Extraordinary
by Kallios the Scholar
Summary: My mother doesn't really love me. She tries sometimes... but I'm not what she wants. I don't have an IQ of 300 and I can't bend spoons with the power of my mind. I'm not psychic like she and my sister are. I'm not good enough. But I'll prove her wrong. I'll show her. I'll show her that an ordinary person can be everything that is extraordinary.
1. Prologue: My Mother

**Disclaimer: I don't own Pokémon**

**Notes: A short, standalone ficlet that probably won't be continued anytime soon. This does not, however, give ****_anyone_**** the right to use the plot or characters contained within the story without so much as bothering to inform the original author of your intentions.**

* * *

One of my earliest memories is of my mother commanding her Alakazam to use Hypnosis on me when I refused to take my nap. I was about six years old. There was nothing particularly nasty about her actions: she let me rant and whine and complain and plead for several minutes, not attempting to reason with me or even make the pretense of listening, then decided that enough was enough when I showed no signs of shutting up anytime soon and brought her Alakazam into play.

That's my mother: utterly ruthless. Some people seem to think that ruthlessness equates evil, but it doesn't, not really. Being ruthless simply means doing what needs to be done without factoring in things such as compassion, mercy, or love. I had refused to obey my mother, my mother knew that I needed my nap at the age of six, and when it became apparent that I was willing to argue with her until I fell over from exhaustion she simply used a resource that was at her disposal to do what needed to be done.

Unless you couldn't tell, I had been arguing with myself about this memory and its implications for a very, very long time. You see, my mother is a psychic. She can bend spoons and read minds, actually _do_ all that stuff, and when she was a trainer all of her pokémon were Psychic types. Alakazam, who had been with her since the beginning of her journey, was the only one she kept once she won her eight Badges, however.

I have other memories of my mother being herself. She got married and had a son, a divorce, a second marriage and then a daughter, and then me, and a final divorce. Clark, the son, is about seven years older than me. I don't know him very well. He chucked rocks through all of the windows of the school when he was maybe nine years old and was shipped off to live with our grandfather in the Kanto region as a result. That's my mom. When she realized that her son was rebellious and would no longer obey her, she washed her hands clean of him. When my brother joined Team Rocket for reasons of his own, she disowned him entirely and now talks of him as though he had been dead for the last five years.

Her second child worked out much better, however. Miranda has all of Mom's powers and all of her formidable intellect. I can remember them sitting at the kitchen table together, having hour-long conversations _but never opening their mouths to speak_. Creepy, no? Mom trained Miranda in ESP and gave her three pokémon to start her journey with when she turned ten: Abra, Meditite, and Chingling. All Psychic types.

I never really liked Miranda. She was never interested in me as a person, preferring the company of books or Mom over my own presence. My chatter annoyed her. My actions—any and all of them—annoyed her. She found me slow and dimwitted and tedious to endure. She also made sure to inform me of her opinions, and Lord help me if I tried to fight her: if you throw something at a psychic, you're very lucky if the object just halts in midair and drops to the ground. When you're _un_lucky, the object comes rocketing back at you at a high rate of speed.

Typically, I was unlucky. Also, I used rocks. It shouldn't take much effort to fill in the rest of the blanks. To this day, I still have a scar on my eyebrow from the experience.

And as for me, the youngest of my mother's brood... I think that I am another failure in Mom's eyes. Just like Clark, I don't have the psychic powers than run in the family's genes. My academic accomplishments are those of a person with an average IQ. I am not special the way she and Miranda are special. She tries to love me, I think, but Mom has all of the natural mothering instinct of a brick. She tries but... she just doesn't know how to relate to other people well, especially children, and is easily bored by them. Miranda was her pride: Miranda was reading Tolkien at the age of six and avidly enjoying Shakespeare by nine. If nothing else, Mom was proud of her middle child's accomplishments and found room in her naturally frigid heart for a smidgen of affection. As for me... I was always more of a rather wearisome but necessary chore to her than anything else.

Tomorrow is my tenth birthday. I have been saving my allowance for the last six months to buy a poké ball. I will go out and catch a pokémon without assistance. I will train that pokémon and catch five more. I will collect all eight Gym Badges and then go on to beat the Elite Four and the Champion.

I will show my mother that it requires "ordinary" to spell the word "extraordinary".


	2. Can't You Even Say Goodbye?

**That's ****_IT!_**** Okay! I give in! I'm writing the damn fanfic! I got three reviews in two days that all told me to update and continue the story. Since I've gone through a period where no-one seemed to even bother ****_looking_**** at my stories for what feels like centuries (it was probably more like six months, but whatever) I gave in rather easily. Eh, well, I guess I should be thanking you all for encouraging me to write. It's just that this isn't the only story I'm writing, and ****_Extraordinary_**** is going to take a back seat to my other fanfic-so don't expect an update every other day. I'm fast when I want to be, but I'm not Hermes and the holiday season is busy.**

**On that note, a very merry Christmas to you all.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Pokémon.**

* * *

"A pokémon journey," my mother repeats flatly, her voice devoid of any inflection... of anything at all, really. It's as close as she ever comes to shocked disbelief, and my mother never was one for showing emotion.

"Ala..." Alakazam says from his position at her shoulder. They are both giving me flat stares, their eyes hooded and emotionless and coldly analytical. My mother's eyes are grey in color, like granite pebbles during wintertime, while the psychic pokémon's eyes are as dark as sloe and utterly inhuman. I watch the both of them from my position at the kitchen table, one hand holding a spoon that currently hovers over a bowl of cold cereal.

I swallow what's in my mouth. Somehow, my food has become absolutely tasteless and now has all the appeal of mushy cardboard. "Yes," I say in response. "I'm going on a journey."

My mother nods at me. She has a long, thin face with guarded eyes and a mouth that never smiles. A lock of her dark hair, now sprinkled with silver thanks to the advancing years, has escaped from her braid and hangs down onto her shoulder.

I wait for her to say something, anything. My mother hadn't smiled very much even when _Miranda_ had begun her journey, but her lips had at least twitched upwards at the corners a little, and there had been a spark of rarely-seen warmth in her eyes. Pride, that warmth had been. She'd been so damn proud of Miranda that day, as the most beloved of her children set out on the journey of a lifetime.

I carefully search my mother's eyes for that same spark of warmth, even a diminished version of it, and find... nothing. Not even so much as a glow. Her eyes glitter like diamonds—and just like diamonds, they are colder than Snowpoint in wintertime.

"A pokémon journey will be good for you," she says after another long, tense moment has passed. "Travel broadens the mind." The words _and it'll get an untalented, unwanted daughter away from me_ hang unspoken but nevertheless present between us, like a brick wall. I have an odd, painful sensation in my chest as those unspoken words reach my intuition, which sometimes works better than my ears: I feel like a Machoke has taken my heart in one huge hand and is trying to yank it out of my chest, twisting and pulling at the same time. It hurts.

I begin eating my cereal again, glad for an excuse not to make eye contact with her. An Ekans with a grudge cannot manage a more loveless stare than my mother. "If you wish, I will ask Miranda to send you a pokémon from her storage account," my mother says. I glance up at her through my bangs—she is still looking at me flatly, without any emotion visible on her stern face. I can never tell what she's thinking. Was she really concerned about me enough to offer help? Or was she just being condescending to her ordinary, mundane, younger and underprivileged daughter?

"I can catch my own," I say, and if there is an undercurrent of sulky stubbornness to my tone then my mother makes no sign of hearing it. I do not _want_ something that Miranda has gone and caught solely for the sake of the pokédex project that she's working on for Professor Rowan. Knowing her, she would seek out the weakest Bidoof in all of Sinnoh and capture it specially, just for me.

"Very well," my mother says with the barest of nods. Just like that, our conversation ends as she turns her back on me to make her own breakfast. I finish my cereal in silence and wash out my bowl, placing it back in the cabinet with the rest of the crockery. I walk quietly out of the kitchen, down the hall, and into my bedroom. My backpack, filled with everything I thought I would need and packed the night before, is resting at the foot of my bed. I lace up my hiking boots and shrug on a jacket, then pick it up and shrug it on, rolling my shoulders until its position against my back is as comfortable as it's going to get. The backpack is heavy, but its weight is not unbearable.

Last but not least, I pick up the poké ball from my nightstand. The smooth, red-and-white plastic surface is shiny to look at and cool to the touch. I use the hem of my shirt to polish away a stray fingerprint before clipping it to my belt. Miranda isn't the only one who can be perfect.

I'm ready to go.

I leave my bedroom and walk back through the kitchen. My mother is sipping coffee and scanning the newspaper, frowning over the latest headline about Team Galactic. Nobody knew much about them, except that they were typically harmless thugs who did their best to bully and steal, but were easily scared off. Nobody considered them much of a threat to anyone besides very young trainers, and it was a simple matter of encouraging beginning trainers to travel in pairs or even in trios. Galactic grunts weren't willing to fight if the odds were stacked against them.

"I'm leaving now," I say, pausing at the front door with my hand on the knob. Alakazam is reading over my mother's shoulder, its long mustache-ends trailing over the grey paper and the long columns of black text.

"Goodbye," Mom says absentmindedly, her eyes never leaving the paper. I watch her for a moment more, noting how the morning sunlight streams in through the kitchen window and seems to cast a sort of golden frame around her. I'm waiting for her to finish a sentence, a paragraph, an article even—I'm waiting for her to find the time for a proper goodbye. Miranda started her journey two years ago and still hasn't come home. I probably won't see Mom again for a long time. Won't she get lonely without a kid around the house?

My mother never looks up from her newspaper. Eventually, I give up and go out the door.

It's time to catch my pokémon. Time to become extraordinary.


	3. A Single Chance

I had been plotting out each step of my pokémon journey long before my tenth birthday rolled around. Like most kids, I planned to follow the Gym circuit—perhaps not the traditional circuit, which would require a lot of needless hassle to follow thanks to where I lived (a.k.a. Floaroma Town)—but I was definitely going to be seeing all of Sinnoh as my Badge Case got heavier and heavier with each achievement that was added to it.

And, just like most kids, I daydreamed about my starter.

My starter was going to be _cool_. It was going to be _special_. It was going to be _powerful_. In other words, it was going to be the poster child of everything that I saw as extraordinary combined into one pokémon. I didn't care about physical appearance: battling capability was what I was looking for.

My first choice would be something from Professor Rowan's lab—he had started up something called "The Pokédex Project" and one of the incentives to join was a starter pokémon from his personal collection. Of course, the other incentive was the actual _pokédex_, which served as a completely valid substitute for a trainer's license as well as being a high-tech encyclopedia. It was for the pokédex that Miranda had joined the Program, though she had declined with her usual, standoffish arrogance the offer of a Turtwig.

I wanted a Chimchar from the lab, if possible. It was almost useless against Roark, the Rock-type Leader of Oreburgh's Gym, but with a little training it would be able to learn Fighting-type moves that would be super effective against his team. And it was a Fire-type, which would be useful against Gardenia in Eterna City. Perhaps not so useful against Crasher Wake, the Water-type leader, but I would have other pokémon on my team by then to compensate for the type disadvantage.

The only problem would be _obtaining_ my oft dreamed-of Chimchar, which would require traveling all the way to Sandgem Town and the Professor's lab. I would need a pokémon to get there in one piece if I used the trainer's method of walking alone and unarmed, but it would burn a huge, smoking hole into my pitiful stash of savings to use safer, civilian transportation such as buses. I could do that, or bribe my mother's Alakazam into teleporting me. The last option was out of the question, however: I was not going to have even the slightest bit of help from my mother in this endeavor. I was setting out to prove to her that it didn't require psychic powers to be extraordinary, and getting her psychic pokémon involved to transport me would only defeat my purpose.

So that option was also crossed off my list, then. My list of choices concerning starter pokémon had never been very large, even to begin with, and now it grew even thinner. I could contact a breeder and ask to see what they had cheap—probably Starly or Shinx or something common and relatively weak. At least the pokémon would be clean, healthy, and already house-trained by the time I got it.

But _darn it_, I had already bought the poké ball. And I wanted a pokémon that belonged exclusively to _me_. I didn't _want_ to contact a breeder and get something that was (for all intents and purposes) secondhand. But I would, if I had to. If I had enough money.

Of course, if worst came to worst I could always check the local Pokémon Center to see if there were any pokémon up for adoption. There probably would be—children who gave up the life of a trainer and either no longer wanted their pokémon and/or couldn't keep them as pets, or else pokémon too weak, too sick, or too handicapped to survive in the wild could typically be adopted there. The pokémon would be completely free. A friend of mine had gotten her Skitty there, a kitten who had been born with a clubbed foot.

In some ways, I am just as vain and arrogant as Miranda: I disregarded that choice almost as soon as it came to me. Crippled pokémon were not even slightly extraordinary, and therefore not in my interest to obtain.

I would need to capture my pokémon from the wild.

* * *

And so, here I am, crouching behind a pecha plant in full flower in an attempt to conceal myself as I peer deeply into the river that intersects Route 205, searching for a pokémon that meets my standards. They've been lowered slightly thanks to my somewhat limited options of travel and obtainment, but they're still high.

I want a pokémon that I can catch simply by throwing my single poké ball at it, but most pokémon that are strong and healthy will escape with laughable ease—and break the poké ball in the process. I cannot afford a second one, so I only have one shot at this. I needed a pokémon that was sick or injured, one that could be caught easily and then be healed and made strong. Strong enough to be my starter and at least pave the way to a second pokémon. Magikarp are out of the question, but anything else...

Anything else will be _more_ than duly considered.

A trio of pink, squishy-looking Shellos swim slowly by me, giving me a wide berth but otherwise not acknowledging me as much of a threat. Not many trainers are interested in capturing a Shellos—they aren't exactly known for their immense strength, and neither are they particularly cute unless you enjoy your pokémon plump and slimy. I watch them, options playing out inside my head, debating the advisability of capturing one.

I am just bringing my poké ball out of my pocket when a yellow and orange flash darts out of a pocket of cattails and surges towards the trio of Shellos, moving lightning-fast and using a powerful breaststroke. Dimly through my surprise I recognize the pokémon as a Buizel, though why it would be swimming using its arms rather than its propeller-like tails I have no idea. One of the Shellos let loose a shrill warning ("shello!") when it saw the rapidly approaching predator, and another had enough initiative to use a Water Pulse.

The move didn't seem to cause much damage to the pokémon, but the Buizel was confused—an after-effect of the Water Pulse. Rather than completing its course towards the Shellos, it veered crazily to one side and smashed its forehead into a rock that lined the bank of the river. It sunk out of sight for a moment, but then quickly reappeared thanks to its inflatable collar. Its head bobbed on the surface of the river like a cork and spun gently thanks to the current. By the time the Buizel had resurfaced and snapped out of its confusion, however, the trio of Shellos had fled. The area was now utterly deserted save for me, the Buizel, and the distant singing of Starly in the trees.

"Bui," the Buizel muttered darkly, panting hard and looking royally annoyed with how its hunting trip had turned out. Just like me, it had been hoping for an easy catch. Now that I could see it clearly, I saw that one eye had been swollen shut. There was a patch of dried, hardened pus running down that side of its face, caked to the short orange fur there.

The Buizel was sick, and possibly injured as well. Also, I had lived in Floaroma Town all my life and Buizel were a relatively common sight around here. I had grown up with them living nearby—even shooed them away from the garbage cans on occasion, brandishing a broom and shouting to make them scatter and flee.

Buizel were so ordinary that they weren't even the least bit extraordinary. Just like me. I needed something _powerful_ to begin my journey of becoming extraordinary, or at least my journey of showing that I could raise and train extraordinary pokémon. But... well, I had seen the other pokémon that could be obtained in the area. Pachirisu, and Shellos of course, along with the Drifloon that hung around the Valley Windworks on Fridays. If I went south of the town I might also find Kricketot and Budew. None of these other species were particularly promising.

With a barely-suppressed sigh of resignation, I threw my lone poké ball.

The ball's shiny surface flashed once in the bright sunlight as it arced through the air, turning gently. My eyes tracked its progress as it rose and then began to fall as gravity took hold. The poké ball opened a few seconds before it hit the water, absorbing the Buizel inside of it with a beam of red light.

The poké ball clicked shut and fell with an anticlimactic _plop_ into the river. I gave an indignant, startled yelp as I realized just what I had done—what kind of trainer is stupid enough to throw their poké ball into a river when she can't swim?—and then disentangled myself from the pecha plant, its small thorns catching on my clothing and making scratches on my exposed skin, snarling and tugging at my hair as I gracelessly wiggled out of its clutches. I scrambled to my feet and ran down the path to the bridge, a simple affair of weathered planks that I threw myself down on to reach as far as I could towards the water.

I stretched out my arm and fished my poké ball from the current just before it drifted out of reach. Thank Arceus. I let out the breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding and sat up, holding the little red-and-white sphere maybe just a _little_ more tightly than was strictly necessary.

Resting in my palm with my fingers clamped tight around it, water droplets still clinging to its surface, the poké ball was trembling and shaking as the Buizel inside it fought to escape. I was sitting on the little plank bridge and watching the poké ball, waiting for it to stop shaking and for the button to ding and signify capture. The pokémon was sick and probably not too terribly strong, going by the levels of the other pokémon in the area. With that reasoning, there was a very high likelihood of the Buizel being captured.

Of course, theoretical and experimental probability are two vastly different things.

Less than a quarter of a second later, I had an extremely ticked-off Buizel standing in front of me on the bridge, swaying in place from exhaustion and peering blearily at me out of its good eye.

I gulped and slowly shifted backwards.


	4. Striking Sparks

There are reasons, of course, that children just starting their training journeys don't go after powerful pokémon right off the bat. For one thing, most ten year old kids don't have the maturity to responsibly order and direct a creature that has enough power to level skyscrapers and cause tidal waves.

For another thing, the more powerful a pokémon, the harder it tends to be to train and control. A pokémon is still wild after it's been caught, contrary to popular belief. It won't immediately do what its trainer tells it to do, and it will relieve itself on the floor and eat messily and attack whatever it sees as a threat (such as curious toddlers who pull its tail).

Just because there's a poké ball clipped to your belt, and just because the super-powered creature standing in front of you is bonded to that poké ball and will be forced to return inside of it at the click of a button... that doesn't mean that there won't be violence. Newly-caught pokémon will lash out at their trainers.

Sometimes they will even kill them.

With these facts in mind, I slowly backed away from the escaped Buizel, holding up my bare hands to show that I was unarmed—that, and to attempt to protect my face, if necessary. I didn't know what the pokémon was going to do next. It looked to be in pretty bad shape and it had taken a long time to break out of the poké ball, but it had still broken out. There were hidden reserves of strength in this creature.

The Buizel took a slow step towards me, its tails dragging on the planks of the bridge behind it. Its lips peeled back to reveal sharp white teeth—perfect for snatching Shellos and Magikarp and whatever else it could snag—that looked mightily effective at biting things. It growled low in its throat, a menacing sound that would have made me scream and run if this encounter had taken place at night.

The Buizel took another step towards me, raising its paws in front of it like it was going to attack. And then, without ceremony, its eyes rolled up into its head and it collapsed onto the surface of the bridge.

Wait, what?

I stood my ground and waited. Pokémon are very clever—my mother's Alakazam had read through three sets of encyclopedias in a single afternoon—and many of them use tricks and ploys to fight and/or snare their prey. Buizel were carnivorous, so perhaps this creature was trying to lure me into coming closer and not running away.

I continued waiting. Nothing happened. The day was warm and I could feel sweat making my tee-shirt stick to my skin. I took a step back and crouched down, pulling my baseball cap out of my backpack and securing it onto my head. It provided a little shade, at least.

Still, nothing happened. The Buizel did not move. I cautiously inched forward.

The pokémon didn't stir. I reached out and jabbed the wet fur of its shoulder, then jerked my arm back, expecting flashing teeth and raging eyes. The Buizel remained lying face-down on the bridge. It hadn't so much as twitched when I had poked it. Starly sang in the trees and, downstream, I could see Shellos browsing on waterside plants. Route 205 was utterly devoid of terror.

"You alive?" I asked tentatively.

No response. Emboldened, I reached out and turned the pokémon over so that it was lying on its back, digging my fingers into the fur of its neck to check that it had a pulse. It did. The Buizel was still alive, though only just barely. Now that I could get a better look at it, I could see that it looked skinny and malnourished, and that its fur was dull and coarse to the touch.

This was very probably my only shot at obtaining a pokémon of my very own. _Yes_, the ball was broken. _Yes_, the creature in question very probably hated me. But also _yes_, I still had my high standards and didn't want to back down from them and settle for something less.

This Buizel was very probably going to be the best thing I would ever find.

I sighed heavily and began wondering just how I was supposed to transport "my" pokémon to the Pokémon Center in Floaroma Town. That was half a mile away, and your average Buizel was about two and a half feet tall, and weighing around sixty-five pounds. Too big and heavy, in other words, for your average ten-year-old to carry.

I dragged the unconscious Buizel into the shade beneath the pecha plant and took off my backpack, leaving it lying beside the pokémon. Both were off the path and hidden from the glare of the sun, which had started to beat down fiercely. I crouched down as close as I could to the Buizel without crawling into the bush. "Just stay there, okay?" I asked. "I'm trying to help you."

The Buizel's nose twitched, and its good eye opened a sliver so that it could peer at me. One lip lifted in a silent snarl of menace for a moment, but there was no real fire in the demonstration and it slowly shifted into a more comfortable position beneath the pecha plant. The bush was old growth and had been there for as long as I could remember, slowly overtaking its bed and sometimes encroaching on the road until it was trimmed back. Its berries were big and sweet, and a lot of people traveling to the Valley Windworks would stop to pick some on their way there. There was plenty of cover for the Buizel to stay out of sight.

"Don't let anyone steal my backpack," I said. There was a weak growl from within the pecha plant. "Please," I added, then turned and jogged back down the dusty dirt road, towards Floaroma Town.

* * *

"What do you want with my wagon?"

"I need it."

"Why?"

"Because I need it."

"But why do you need it?"

"I need to carry something."

"What?"

"...I don't want to tell you."

"Is it a secret?"

"Sorta."

"You can tell me. I promise not to let anyone know."

"It's a really big surprise. For Nurse Joy. I need your wagon."

"Sure, go ahead, take it. Are you bringing Nurse Joy a present?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"Can I see what it is?"

"Wait at the Pokémon Center for me if you want. I'll be along."

"Alright... Um, I was wondering..."

"Yeah?"

"Is it going to be a _nice_ present?"

"...I hope so."

* * *

Twenty minutes later I came back to the pecha plant at Route 205, pulling a little red wagon behind me that bounced on the pebbles in the road. Its axle creaked and the wheels squeaked as they turned. The sound had been steadily putting my teeth on edge.

I let the handle fall into the grass beside the route and dropped down onto my belly to peer under the bush. The Buizel was still there, and had apparently fallen asleep. However, it had somehow managed to unzip my backpack, and had pulled out the sandwiches I had packed for myself for lunch. The empty wrappers, now containing nothing but stray smears of mayonnaise, were lying beside the sleeping pokémon.

I frowned at it. Most wild pokémon would have simply shredded the backpack if they were hungry and had smelled the sandwiches. Also, Buizel were not known for being fastidious. But then again, there were exceptions to every rule.

"Hey," I said. The Buizel opened one eye.

"Are you coming to the Pokémon Center with me, to Floaroma Town? There'll be medicine there for you, and Nurse Joy will make you feel better."

I felt silly, having to coax a pokémon into coming with me the way I would have had to gently persuade a little child that I was babysitting. But there was nothing else to do, really. The Buizel probably didn't know anything extraordinarily powerful such as Hydro Pump or Aqua Tail, but any animal with teeth and claws can do a fair amount of damage when provoked. There was no point in making the pokémon angry with me.

As it turned out, there was no point in even speaking to it. The Buizel showed its teeth to me again and curled deeper into the bush, and I could see the sunlight that filtered through the tangled leaves glinting on its black eyes as it watched me with feral wariness.

I huffed in frustration. My day was turning out to be absolutely anything but extraordinary.

"Fine," I grumbled, inwardly laying curses on every deity I could think of. The best shot I would ever have had at obtaining a pokémon that was even a little bit extraordinary—foiled! "Have it your way. Just let me have my backpack back, will you?"

The Buizel growled again and closed its eyes, curling into a tight ball so that the tips of its two tails were touching its nose. Taking that as my permission, I hesitantly reached in and grabbed one of the straps of my backpack, quickly hauling it out from under the bush and placing it on the wagon. As I did so, I noticed a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye.

A Pachirisu was investigating the berry bush, and apparently liked the smell of the flowers. It was burying its little button nose in each bloom and inhaling deeply, making dreamy little sighs of "Pa!" and "Chi!" as it did so.

D'awww.

The Pachirisu wiggled its way into the bush so that only its tail was showing, and there discovered the Buizel. There was a frightened squeal from the electric squirrel, and a growl from the Buizel. One of them must have used a Quick Attack, because the entire bush shook. A few flowers fell to the ground, and the Pachirisu's tail disappeared into the plant.

I waited, too intrigued to move.

"Bui!" the sea weasel yelped, and suddenly there was an orange streak going past me, attempting to find a way around or over the white fence that separated the road and the river. The pokémon was frantic and slammed its body against the wood, trying to smash through it. It was getting slower and slower, and weaker and weaker.

"Pachi!" the Pachirisu growled, crawling out of the bush and utterly ignoring me, focused on the Buizel. Its white and blue fur sparked and crackled with electricity. It let loose a Spark that zipped towards the Water-type and engulfed the sea weasel's form, causing the Buizel to cry out and slump to the ground.

"Risu," the squirrel ground out, looking positively murderous as it readied another Spark. For a moment I was wondering why it was still attacking when its enemy was defeated, and then I realized: just because the Pachirisu wasn't carnivorous didn't meant that it couldn't get angry and kill. And anything that was capable of intelligence was also capable of murder.

There was the smell of singed fur filling the air, making my stomach twist into knots. I stooped for a stone and grabbed one up, lobbing it, doing the only thing I could think of. It struck the Pachirisu's tail and made the pokémon growl and turn towards me, releasing its Spark.

Being electrocuted isn't like being burned. It's a very intense burst of pain that arrives very suddenly and then leaves, just as suddenly. Or at least, the main effect leaves immediately. I only got out one good scream of agony before the greatest part of the torment was over. The... the shock of the pain, I guess you can call it that... lingered, however, and I felt woozy and disjointed and very, very weak.

My hand still hurt, though. I was sick to my stomach and not really steady on my feet anymore, but I raised my hand to my eyes and saw that the tips of three of my fingers were burned. It was kind of gross looking.

"Not cool," I muttered, and then fell to my knees and threw up.


	5. Number One

The Pachirisu was still there. It had been waiting for me to try and retaliate, or at least give it another reason to toss a Spark my way, but it was still there and it still looked plenty angry. Its fur was surrounded by a nimbus of bluish electricity that pulsed and flared every few moments, crackling static filling the surrounding space. The air smelled like metal, and I could taste iron at the base of my tongue.

The pokémon that was glaring murderously at me looked like a bomb ready to go off, in fact. Any second now, really. I wiped my mouth on my wrist and stared at the pokémon, dull-eyed and too weak and sick to move.

"Please," I begged. My mouth tasted like bile and the syllables came out as a croak. The words sounded hollow and tired.

"Please," I said again, mustering enough energy to spit in an attempt to get the taste of vomit out of my mouth. I didn't know what else to add to that one word. My hand felt like it was on fire and I couldn't breathe very well, and my eyes felt hot and I could feel tears gathering in them.

Behind the Pachirisu, the Buizel was slowly dragging itself upright, using the fence as support. There was the grim rictus of a snarl on its face. It staggered towards the Pachirisu, fell on top of it, and sank its teeth into one ear. Pachirisu released its third Spark.

Blasts of mud hit them both, the Electric and the Water type pokémon being thrown back against the fence and hitting the wood with force. Both of them fell to the ground, limp and covered with liquified dirt.

I fainted.

* * *

I've always attributed something very shameful to the act of fainting. For one thing, it happens far too often in romance novels to weak-willed and spineless heroines. For another thing, when a battle is lost then the losing pokémon is typically unconscious. I've never fainted before.

It's sort of like your brain is saying, "Okay, don't want to deal with this crap anymore," and then going to sleep for a little while. Also, when you faint from pain or surprise/shock, it's typically only for a couple of seconds.

I was out for about five of those, I swear. It couldn't have been any longer.

Nevertheless, when I woke up, I was in the lobby of some big building and being placed on some sort of cart. There was a worried-looking Chansey peering at me over its edge, and a nurse—not Nurse Joy, so this wasn't a Pokémon Center—was walking beside me, her heels clicking on the green-tiled floor.

"Where...?" I muttered, and the nurse must have gotten the gist of what I was saying, because she ran her hand over my hair in a vaguely comforting, motherly gesture that my own mother had never even attempted, and told me that I was in the emergency ward of the Jubilife Hospital.

Oh.

And then the nurse was telling me to hush, and that I'd already gotten a sedative, and her words really did seem quite sensible and I was tired and in pain and sleep seemed quite lovely at the moment.

I slept.

* * *

When I awoke for the second time, I didn't open my eyes immediately. Wherever I was, it was quiet, and there was the distant sound of traffic. It seemed to be coming from a long way away, or else the sound was muted in some manner. There was the sound of a ceiling fan's blades churning the air around above my head. There was also a scritching noise, one that I couldn't identify.

I gave in and opened my eyes.

I was in a hospital room, a place of pale green walls and a white tile floor, with three other beds sharing the room with me. Two of them were occupied, but I couldn't see much of the people that were lying in them. A window on the far side of the room, to my right, let in sunshine. It was open, and a breeze stirred the curtains. Outside of the window was where the sounds of traffic were strongest.

Next to me, on my right, was a chair. It was a sort of reception-room chair, one that looked like it belonged in an office (but not on the side of the desk where all of the power was, if you get me) and didn't seem overly comfortable.

Sitting on the chair was a girl, about my age, wearing a white, frilly sundress with a pattern of pink carnations on it. She was also wearing sandals of pale leather, and there was a sunhat with a pink ribbon resting in her lap. A silver necklace with a pendant made from pinkish crystal was looped around her neck.

She was happily absorbed with a coloring book, using a pack of colored pencils to carefully shade in a picture of a Chansey. Between her feet and leaning on one of her legs was a dozing Wooper. Oddly, it was pink.

My burned hand was swathed in white bandages and splinted. I twitched my fingers slowly, watching the digits that were exposed (the burned ones were not) curl on the thin cotton coverlet. There was no pain now, which probably meant that I had some sort of painkiller in me.

"Oh, you're awake," the girl said. I glanced over to her. She had put down her pencils and was looking at me. She had long, curly, strawberry-blonde hair and rich brown eyes, and her mouth was shiny with pink lip gloss. She smiled, and revealed a mouthful of orthodontia that probably cost more than my entire life's savings.

"Hi," she said, standing up and walking over to my bedside. "My name's Amelia. I found you outside of Floaroma Town, with that Pachirisu. My Wooper saved you from it, by the way. That's her over there." Amelia gestured to the pink Wooper that was dozing beneath the chair.

I nodded awkwardly at her. "Thank you," I said. "Um... I've never seen a Wooper that color before."

This must have been the right sort of comment to make to Amelia. She beamed happily at me. "Yeah, she's shiny. My daddy bought her for me from a breeder in Pastoria City. Have you ever been there? It's a nice little place, though a bit muddy and quite damp."

I shook my head in negation, and Amelia pulled her chair closer to the bed and sat down. She smoothed her skirt and returned the Wooper to her poké ball, slipping the ball into a little pink handbag that hung on her arm from a slender strap.

"My daddy and I are from Sunyshore City," Amelia continued, happy to keep talking. "Daddy came west on a business trip, so I decided to tour Sinnoh. It seemed like a good idea. 'Travel broadens the mind', and all that. My bodyguard Teleported you here—my Gallade, I mean—when we found you. Were you battling that Pachirisu? I, um... well, when my Wooper's Mud Shot knocked it out, I captured it. It was just so cute that I couldn't resist the temptation. I'm sorry if you were intending to capture it yourself."

I absorbed that information for a moment before reply. "You can keep the Pachirisu," I said, slowly shifting on the hospital bed until I was sitting upright. "I didn't really want it. Um, did you capture the Buizel as well?"

Amelia frowned at me for a moment. "No, I didn't. It wasn't very cute _at all_, and I'm not all that interested in un-cute pokémon. Besides, it was yours, and stealing is very, very wrong. My Gallade Teleported it here as well, don't worry. Um, I went back and looked around the route when the doctors were with you, but I couldn't find your Buizel's poké ball. I'm sorry."

I wasn't really sure how to respond to that, and gingerly reached out to pat her shoulder with my uninjured hand. "That's okay," I said hesitantly, letting the whirl of information sink into my mind and settle there. "Where is the Buizel?" I asked next, preparing myself for another torrent.

Amelia tapped one of her feet on the floor, the hardened soles of her sandals making the noise louder than I had thought it would be. She opened her mouth to speak, but just then the door to the room opened and a white-and-green, bipedal pokémon stepped in.

_Miss Ridgeway_, it said in a flat, genderless telepathic voice, taking in both Amelia and I with its red eyes. I was no 'Miss Ridgeway' and so simply sat silent on the bed, watching the conversation unfold as the Gallade continued speaking: _A journalist has heard of the incident on Route 205 and wishes to speak with you for an article in her magazine. She is in the lobby at the moment. Do you have any desire to converse with her?_

Amelia's eyes widened. "Oh, yes, I'd better go do that," the girl said, getting to her feet. She took a step towards the door and then glanced back at me, flashing another smile. "Get better soon, okay?" she asked.

I nodded uncomfortably, making a weak attempt at an answering grin.

Amelia smiled again, and then walked quickly out the door. The Gallade watched her go down the hall and turn a corner, but made no move to follow her. Once Amelia was out of sight, it turned its gaze back to me.

_What was your business outside of Floaroma Town, Miss?_ it asked.

"Uh... uh, I was starting my training journey," I said, feeling distinctly uncomfortable.

The Gallade's facial expression didn't change, and I was absolutely terrible at reading pokémon body language, but I got the feeling that the Gallade was distinctly unimpressed with me.

_The Buizel has stated that you were attempting to steal her from her trainer_, the Gallade said. _That would make you a pokémon thief, which is a crime of extreme seriousness_.

"What!" I said, sitting straight up in bed and putting my weight on my injured hand. A dull bolt of pain shot up my arm, doubtless numbed by the painkillers that were circulating through my body until it was merely agonizing. I ignored it. "No! I'm not a thief! That Buizel was wild! I _found_ it in the Route 205 river, I swear!"

The Gallade's eyes flashed with anger. _Nevertheless, she has stated that she already has a trainer and that you attempted to capture her with a poké_ _ball. This is a crime. Crimes should be punished._

"But I didn't _know_ the Buizel had a trainer!" I wailed. "I'm sorry! I won't do it again, I promise! Please don't turn me over to Officer Jenny, _please_ don't! My mom will be so mad at me if she has to come and pick me up from the Jubilife Police Station."

At the thought of my mother Teleporting to Jubilife with her Alakazam, I was suddenly filled with panic and horror. The events of the morning were bad enough, but I had no desire to bring my mother into the picture. She would be so ashamed of me... I would be less than nothing in her eyes, as bad as Clark had been. She'd disown me. She'd hate me forever and ever.

Much to my chagrin, I started to cry.

The Gallade waited patiently for a few moments, until the emotional breakdown had become manageable and I was once more capable of rational thought. I got a glass of water from the pitcher on the bedside table and drank slowly, hunched over the plastic cup in my lap and feeling thoroughly miserable with myself.

_May I continue?_ it inquired. A telepathic voice couldn't really carry any emotion, but I think that if it could have, the Gallade's voice would have been beyond dry.

I sniffled once and nodded. "Yeah," I said. "Sorry."

_Though the Buizel believes firmly in wrongdoing being punished, she has taken into account your attempt to protect her from Miss Ridgeway's Pachirisu, which she had admitted to being unable to battle even without the type disadvantage. Therefore, she has requested to speak to you, so that a bargain may be struck that will satisfy both parties._

I blinked slowly. "Oh. Um, alright, that sounds fine. I agree."

The Gallade bowed its head to me briefly, and then disappeared as it Teleported. For a moment after it was gone, I saw an outline of the pokémon hang in the air like a heat haze, and then it reappeared with the Buizel.

The Buizel was exactly the way that I remembered it—well, her—she was rather thin and malnourished, with dull fur that was matted in places and one eye squeezed closed. There were half-healed wounds sprinkled across her body, and she looked tired. An ungainly jump brought her on top of the hospital bed, and she sat back on her haunches between my ankles, regarding me critically with her black eyes.

_She asks you why you attempted to capture her_, the Gallade said.

"I needed to capture a pokémon to begin my pokémon journey," I said.

_I have told her that you did not know that she belonged to another. She understands this, and has apologized for her... disheveled appearance that may have given you the wrong impression. She asks what you would have done if you had captured her._

I ran my uninjured hand through my hair, trying to think. "Well, the plan would have been to hike to Eterna City, where I would apply to take a test for a Trainer's License in Gardenia's Gym—since it's either at a Gym or at the Trainer's School in Jubilife—and on the way capture a Bug-type in Eterna Forest. I'd battle Gardenia for the Forest Badge, then use the Cycling Road to take a shortcut to Oreburgh—"

"Buizel," the Buizel growled. I stopped talking.

_She says that she has heard enough_, the Gallade translated.

I nodded. "Um, can I ask a question of her?" I asked.

_You may._

"Well, if you already have a trainer, Buizel, then why aren't you with him or her? Why were you in the Route 205 river?" I asked, speaking directly to the pokémon.

The Buizel twisted around to face the Gallade, and their conversation must have been entirely telepathic—the Buizel probably couldn't speak back to the Psychic/Fighting type, but the Gallade must have been able to read her mind. Or something. I'd never been comfortable with Psychic types, ever. My mother's Alakazam had distilled that feeling of unease in me over the years.

_She says that her trainer was near a city that was near a mountain, and that they were camping. The Buizel was sleeping outside of her poké_ _ball. When she awoke in the morning, her trainer was gone. She has been searching for her ever since._

"How long has she been looking for her trainer?" I asked, impressed in spite of myself. I'd been hearing stories of loyal pokémon all my life—but it was one thing to hear the stories and another thing entirely to see living proof of them.

_Two weeks, approximately. She confesses that she was born into captivity and has never known the perils of living wild. She fares poorly. Also, she asks where you think her trainer might be. As a human, you are more familiar with different cities than she is_.

"Well, what was the name of the city?"

_She does not know_. _Pokémon have little interest in the names of human cities._

"Alright, okay... any distinguishing landmarks in the city or around it?"

_She says that there were many tall buildings within the city, and that there was a lake on the other side._

I put my head in my hands. "Was it in Sinnoh, at least?" I asked.

_She is not certain, but she believes that she has never traveled outside of Sinnoh in all of her time with her trainer. She __thinks_ _that the city was within Sinnoh, but she is not sure._

"Does she even know her trainer's _name_?"

_No. She has only ever referred to her trainer as 'Trainer' or 'Master'._

"How about gender, then?"

_Female. With lighter hair._

"What color hair, and how tall?"

_The Buizel does not see in color. She says that her trainer's height is close to yours, however._

I spoke directly to the Buizel this time. "You realize that even if you found the city near where your trainer left you, there's a possibility that she will have moved on by now?" I asked.

"Buizel," Buizel said again. There was a note of defiance in her voice.

_She will continue searching until she has found her trainer. She says that she is willing to help you on your journey, provided that you help her return to her trainer in every possible way that is within your power_.

I thought that over. Okay, it was tempting to have the Buizel on my team. Crasher Wake had a Floatzel, the evolved form, and Wake was the Water-type Gym Leader of Sinnoh. He would probably take only the strongest kinds of Water-type pokémon on his team. Also, it was probable that the Buizel would never find her trainer. If she did, however, then I would probably have some other pokémon on my team by then to compensate for the loss. It seemed like a good deal.

"I accept," I said, sticking out my hand. The Buizel just gave me an odd look. Apparently shaking hands wasn't really a big thing in the pokémon world. Nevertheless, she jerked her head up and down in imitation of a human nod.

_One more thing_, the Gallade said, turning its red eyes on me. _The Buizel says that, if you ever attempt to detain her from reaching her trainer, she will personally rip out your throat._

I stared at her for a moment. The Buizel's eyes were flinty and hard, and utterly sincere. As I watched her, her lips slowly peeled back from her teeth. Though her body was battered and abused, the teeth themselves looked sharp and in perfect working order.

"O-Okay," I said shakily. "Gotcha."

And that was how I acquired my first pokémon.


	6. The End of the Beginning

**Apologies for the filler chapter, but I really did need to wrap up Our Heroine's first day as a trainer. More interesting things will be happening in the next update, I swear.**

**Also, a note before you read: I am not a doctor or surgeon, and though I really do my best to research all of the many injuries that I inflict on my characters, I sometimes make mistakes in applying them. If you spot a medical error anywhere in this fic, _please_ tell me and explain how it would be done properly.**

* * *

In life, you trade things. I can understand that. I can trade staying up late and watching TV to going to bed early so that I won't feel exhausted the following morning. I could also trade one privilege for another, or one favor, etc. Life is one big bundle of compromises, giving up one thing in return for another.

In this case, however, I had apparently gotten the services of Buizel for an indefinite period of time in return for losing half of my left index finger in an extremely permanent fashion. Apparently, Amelia's newly-acquired Pachirisu—now named Bella Mio—had been very powerful for the area she was in. More importantly, the electrical burn I had received from Bella Mio had been enough to really harm the skin, tendons, nerves, and blood vessels of my finger.

In other words, about half of my finger was irreparably damaged. The doctors had amputated it very quickly once the sedatives had kicked in and they'd had a chance to look at my hand, and I now had a row of neat black stitches crawling across the stump of my finger. The other fingers, fortunately, had simply been burned—or at least that was what I came away with after a fifteen-minute explanation that made my head spin—and would heal on their own.

More importantly, the hospital was used to injured trainers coming in and being impatient to leave once they were as fixed as was possible, so all that I got was a stern lecture about how to handle myself around Electric-types, some ointment, more bandages, and instructions to take myself to Nurse Joy in ten days and have the stitches removed from my stump.

Also, the hospital called my mother. It was standard procedure to do so after a trainer under eighteen came in with any major injury, and the parent could refuse to allow their child to continue training if he or she so desired.

My mother very bluntly told the hospital employee who called her that I was allowed to do whatever I wished. I could imagine the crisp tones, the arched eyebrow, the way she curled the phone cord slowly around her wrist as she spoke. I wouldn't have minded if she hadn't allowed me to continue training—at least that would have shown that she'd cared. But it was the fact that she had been called, the fact that she now knew that I had managed to _lose a good bit of my body on my very first day of pokémon training_ that shamed me.

Miranda hadn't suffered any major injuries in her first _year_ of training. But here I was, the _other_ daughter, the inferior one, requiring an amputation on my _first day_.

I felt like such a failure.

When Amelia found me I was in the hospital lobby, standing at the front desk and mentally cringing at the bill for my care and operation. This went beyond my savings, like _way_ beyond. I could probably go to college for a semester on the amount of money that I was being asked to pay. What was worse was that I didn't have medical insurance. Apparently, insurance would have lowered how much of this bill I would have had to pay.

Amelia plucked the piece of paper that declared how the rest of my life was going to be spent trying pay back the hospital out of my hands and gave it a cursory glance, then snapped open her purse and brought out a checkbook. She quickly wrote one out and handed it over.

I stared at her. Had she... had she really... "Amelia," I squeaked, "That was a _lot_ of money."

"It's not, actually," Amelia said breezily, grinning at me. She was wearing her sunhat now. It looked quite fetching on her, actually, if you liked pink. "Daddy makes more than quintuple that little sum every month, and my allowance was barely _touched_ by paying the bill for you."

Amelia frowned and studied my face for a moment, cocking her head to one side. "You look sad," she observed, and then she grabbed my arm. "C'mon," Amelia said, taking my arm and hauling me towards the door, "Retail therapy time. You are in need of _serious_ cheering up."

_Miss Ridgeway_, her Gallade said, appearing near the door leading out to the streets of Jubilife. _It is imperative that you take your Pachirisu to the Pokémon Center so that it may be vaccinated and entered into the records. Your friend may also want to allow her Buizel to be examined._

"Oh, alright. We'll go to the Pokémon Center first," Amelia said, and from there I went from a hospital for humans to a hospital for pokémon. Hopefully the Buizel wasn't going to drive up an enormous charge for me to pay off.

* * *

As it turns out, the healing services of Pokémon Centers were completely free. Which was awesome, because as soon as the on-duty Chansey caught sight of "my" Buizel, she was whisked away into the bowels of the Center for half an hour.

Amelia's new Pachirisu took less time. Amelia chatted to me about her new pet's name as Bella Mio was vaccinated against diseases and entered into the records (apparently the Gallade had been right) and was happy to wait and browse through coordinater magazines from a rack as I wore a rut in the floor from my impatient pacing.

Finally, however, the Buizel was returned to me, walking beside Nurse Joy. She beckoned me over to the counter and logged onto the computer there. "You do realize that this pokémon does not belong to you?" the Joy asked me.

I rubbed at my throat. "Yes, we've already established that between us," I replied. "She'll be working with me only until she finds her real trainer."

"All pokémon that are treated in Sinnoh Centers are entered into our records with a blood sample," Nurse Joy said, nodding, "This Buizel was first entered into our database about five years ago, under the ownership of Madison Foggarty. If you're looking for her previous trainer, I'd recommend starting with her."

The Joy smiled at me as I felt my heart sink. The Buizel's own information about her trainer went beyond sketchy—armed with only that, it had been likely that she might never find her trainer again. Now, however, there was also a name. With a name, I could probably track down this Madison girl. Which would mean that I would no longer have a Buizel on my team—or any team at all, really.

"Thank you," I choked out. The Buizel shot me a critical look. I recovered myself and asked, "What was the nickname, if you don't mind?"

The Joy pursed her lips and frowned at the screen. "Well, it's listed here as 'Ossë', but I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce it. Ossy? Ozzy?"

"Ozzy will do," I said, getting another critical look from the Buizel. Gee, this Madison chick sure came up with weird names. I watched the Buizel narrow her eyes at me. She looked better, and apparently had gotten a bath—not just a dunking in a river, but an actual bath. With soap and hot water and everything. Her fur looked much cleaner, and the half-healed wounds had been stitched fully closed with lines of black sutures. Both eyes were open and clear now. There was also a splint around one of her tails, however.

Nurse Joy noticed me looking. "She broke a bone in the tail awhile back," the Nurse explained, accepting a clipboard from one of her Chansey helpers. "It healed improperly, so we re-broke it and set it properly. However, while it's healing your Buizel isn't allowed to swim. The splint can't get wet. Also, please go easy with the battling—it'll take longer for her to heal if the stitches are torn."

"Bui!" Ozzy said, looking absolutely horrified. She put her paws on the Joy's leg and looked up imploringly at her, the black eyes filled with heartbreak.

"I'm sorry," the Joy replied to her, looking genuinely contrite. She then turned back to me and handed over a bottle and a piece of paper. "Your pokémon hasn't been eating healthily—carrion and trash-scraps appear to have made up the largest part of her diet recently—and so we're giving you some multivitamins. One with a meal every day, and here's a prescription that will allow you to get more at any Center in Sinnoh."

I put the prescription in my wallet and the bottle of multivitamins into my backpack, and felt Amelia's hand clamp around my forearm like a vise. Apparently her retail therapy couldn't wait any longer.

* * *

There are certain things that one must be aware of when shopping with Amelia Ridgeway. For one thing, she has an almost unlimited amount of cash and sales clerks are drawn to her like Mothim to a flame. For another thing, her tastes run to just about all things pink with a lot of zeroes on the price tag. For one last, final thing, she uses anyone who is going shopping with her as a mannequin and animate dress-up doll.

Ozzy the Buizel got off lightly. We went to have a late lunch before anything else, so the Water-type was allowed to stuff her face with seafood fettucine alfredo and cherry cream soda (probably not the healthiest of foods, but _you_ try telling off a snarling pokémon whose incisors are less than two feet away from your face). After that, she was sent off to rest in my room in the Pokémon Center, which was probably a good thing: when recovering from just about anything, food and sleep are always good choices.

I, of course, didn't get off the hook quite so easily.

"Try this one," Amelia said, handing me a jacket. I took it gravely and went back into the dressing room, putting on the new garment that had been given to me. This was the eighth jacket I had been given to put on—the thirteenth shirt and the fifth pair of pants were resting in the shopping bag hanging on Amelia's arm.

When I came out again, Amelia covered her eyes with her hands and gave a low, dramatic moan of despair. "I'm so sorry," she said, "I don't know what I was thinking with that one. Take it off, please. It clashes horribly with your hair."

I did so, and was promptly handed a new sweater. With a suppressed sigh, I vanished back into the dressing room and changed quickly. It was a charcoal affair, with thick, pale blue stripes running up the sides and the undersides of the long sleeves. The black outline of a Milotic adorned the front.

When Amelia saw this one, she nodded her approval. "Much better," she said, and I took it off. The sweater vanished into the bag, and very soon we were walking out of the store. I deterred Amelia from purchasing training supplies for me, making up excuses wildly—it wasn't that I didn't appreciate her trying to help me (even if the restocking of my wardrobe was neither wanted nor even remotely necessary) but she wasn't the sort of person to take into account the fact that I would need to carry all of my supplies on my back, and that they would have to work all the time, every time, and in any sort of weather or states of filth.

Amelia had shopped just about everywhere in Sinnoh, it seemed. She had hit the Veilstone Department Store the hardest and had lingered in the city for a week, purely for the purchasing of her favorite brands. There were no department stores in Jubilife, but the city had many smaller shops catering towards the fashionistic needs of a young girl with extravagant tastes.

I tried not to look at the price tags or feel utterly ashamed whenever I caused a crease. No-one had ever spent this much money on me before on items that weren't completely necessary. I didn't know how to handle the feeling very well.

Amelia ran her perfectly manicured fingers through my ponytail. "And now," she announced, "For a haircut. You need one."

I settled for hidden resentment.

In the hair salon, it was discovered that I was actually allergic to most brands of cosmetics—my eyes would water and sting and my nose would fill with mucus like I had a particularly bad cold whenever I had something applied to my face. Nevertheless, the stylist cooed over my hair, complimenting the dark color and how soft it was as she hacked hunks of it off.

When the (torture) haircut was finished, I had a pageboy cut that fell to my shoulders, the hair curling under from there. To my surprise, part of the reason that Amelia had chosen it for me was because she had known that it was practical and easy to maintain.

More hours of shopping passed. What I was really interested in was a bookstore, but Amelia never let me linger long and stuck with clothing and jewelry. I complimented whatever she picked and tried on, keeping everything positive—I knew next to nothing about fashion, and Amelia probably didn't need my help in choosing clothing for herself.

Finally, though, it was over. The Gallade Teleported me back to my room in the Pokémon Center at seven o'clock and I stumbled into the tiny bathroom, noticing that Ozzy had filled up the bathtub with water and was dozing contentedly there. I brushed my teeth and crawled under the covers of the narrow bed, asleep before my head hit the pillow.

Thus ended my first day as a pokémon trainer.


	7. Certain Circumstances

The next morning, I woke up to a sopping-wet Buizel standing on my stomach and dripping water all over me, and the first rays of dawn shining in through the curtains. The fingers of my burned hand throbbed dully with pain as I levered myself into a sitting position, the pokémon who had been drenching me/waking me up hopping down onto the floor.

"You slept in that bathtub all night, didn't you?" I asked, struggling to untangle myself from the sheets.

"Buizel," Ozzy replied, looking at me with a mixture of irritation and expectation. I was probably taking too long in getting breakfast for her.

"It's far too early for this," I retorted, finally. Then I scowled at her, my realization dawning with the sunrise. "You weren't supposed to get the cast wet! You—you can't sleep in a filled bathtub!"

"Bui_zel_," Ozzy gritted out, and twitched her tails so that the cast on her tail was in view. It was dry. She had been sleeping with her tails looped around the faucet, keeping them safely out of the water. I looked at the cast for a moment, then sighed in relief and managed to get out of bed.

Ozzy danced around me, impatient to eat and get out of our tiny room in the Pokémon Center. She wove her narrow body between my legs and occasionally stood up on her hind feet, balancing by placing her front paws on my hip to steady herself. Also, she couldn't seem to hold a position for more than three seconds at a time and kept moving. I was constantly stumbling, struggling to pull on yesterday's jeans while hopping on one foot and having a Buizel continuously attempting to overbalance me. I really didn't want to find out what she would do to me if I stepped on her tail—it would probably result in crippling injuries.

Call it an early-morning workout, if you well.

Suddenly, someone was pounding on the door and calling through it in a shrill, feminine voice that I recognized as Amelia's. I didn't realize who it was _right then_, of course—when the first blow hit the wooden door I jumped so hard from shock that I really did overbalance and fall over, giving my shoulder a good knock against the rickety nightstand and landing on top of my burned hand.

For a moment, my mind whited out as a shock of pure pain resonated through my hand and up my arm. It hurt too much to even scream, and I rolled over on the scratchy carpet, clutching my hand to my chest and curling into a tight little ball. Ozzy stuck her cold, wet nose against my neck and growled something that was probably along the lines of "suck it up and get moving before I bite you, human".

I ignored her for several moments, waiting for the pain to fade back to manageable levels before I sat up and continued dressing, refusing to get up from the floor until I was no longer in danger of tripping. I pulled on a tee, my hiking boots, and was just pulling my cap off of the bedpost as I opened the door.

Amelia was, predictably, standing there at the door. She was holding a Buneary in her arms: one with pink tufts of fluff on its ears, and the thicker fur below its waist was pink rather than the usual tan. Another shiny pokémon, then.

"Good morning!" Amelia chirped, smiling. Then she noticed what I was wearing, and her expression instantly went from a grin to scowl. "Those clothes are _filthy_," she said, staring at a dirt stain on my jeans. The _only_ dirt stain to be found on my person, might I add—my clothes were perfectly fine.

"Go change—you're way too dirty to be seen in public."

I gave her a long-suffering look and closed the door, stepping into the cargo pants, camisole, and the thin sweatshirt with the Milotic on it that Amelia had gotten for me yesterday. When I opened the door again, my personal stylist/torturer nodded her approval. "Much better," she said.

As for what Amelia was wearing—bone-white short shorts, a pink tank-top with white flowers, white and pink flipflops, and a pink headband to hold back her hair. Her purse hung on her arm, and I could smell the floral-scented perfume from where I stood.

"Nice pokémon," I said, pretty much indifferent to everything else.

"Her name is Tulip," Amelia replied as the Buneary waved an ear at me, and then we were off.

Breakfast was taken at a diner. _I_ liked it—a nice sorta place, homey, with informal servers and simple but filling food. Amelia adapted well to a dining style that was below her usual standards, and I watched Ozzy inhale seafood quiche like there was no tomorrow, taking bacon and pancakes for myself.

And then I took the test for my license at the Trainer's School, got it, and also obtained some lovely training insurance that meant I wouldn't need to pay for any future amputations that I might require. Amelia I promised to send her some pink pokémon if I ever found them, ended up having her number added to the contacts list on my phone, and then her Gallade Teleported me back to Floaroma Town before it was noon.

* * *

After Jubilife, Floaroma Town was somehow smaller than I remembered. The one-story houses with their red roofs, the flower boxes and gardens, the people and pokémon I knew by sight... they all seemed a little less grand than before. Well, they had never really been grand to begin with, but I had lived here all my life and hadn't imagined bigger places.

Floaroma Town was small and rather quiet, its infrequent disruptions typically being domestic rather than criminal in nature. Its people were sedate and cheerful, happy to be surrounded by flowers and the beauty of nature. The air was cleaner here than in Jubilife, quieter, less filled with busy people that didn't care about anything beyond their own troubles and woes.

I didn't want anything bad to ever, ever happen to my hometown.

"Zel," Ozzy said to me, lightly pressing her claws against my leg so that I could feel the pressure through my pants. It wasn't a threat, more just a way to get my attention.

"Should we get you a poké ball?" I asked.

Ozzy pressed her claws harder into my leg and barred her teeth at me. Okay, _that_ was a threat.

"Never mind," I muttered, and then shifted the weight of my backpack on my shoulders. There was now a Badge Case in there, along with the hardened plastic rectangle that was my Trainer's ID. I was officially on my way to becoming extraordinary.

It was a nice day, good for traveling on foot. I might make it to the eaves of Eterna Forest by nightfall if I pushed hard. I looked around one last time, taking in the houses, the Pokémon Center, the shops and the gardens. When I thought on it, there was no-one here that I really felt the need to say goodbye to. School had just let out and though I liked some of my teachers, most of my classmates weren't really worth remembering. I wasn't old enough to have a job that I could quit. My mother already knew that I was going.

I started off then, my hands stuck in my pockets and a beat-up Buizel walking beside me.

We cleared Floaroma and left it dwindling behind us without speaking much. Some trainers constantly talk to their pokémon, but all that Ozzy probably cared about was finding her former trainer—which was a subject that I didn't particularly want to even _think_ about, really, since if I made plans to find Madison then I'd effectively be making plans about losing my one and only pokémon.

The Route was quiet, and there wasn't much to describe. School had only just let out, and most of the beginning trainers were in Oreburgh right now, battling Roark and attempting to get their Coal Badges from him. It would probably be another week before the trickle towards their next badge turned into a torrent—I'd lived around here long enough to know the training season's ups and downs.

But there still were some trainers working their way towards Eterna City, being pedestrians like I was. Some had pokémon flying, floating, or ambling beside them. Others went completely alone, or else in duos and trios. They were mostly older trainers, ones who were going to the City or the Forest for their own reasons rather than participation in the gym challenge.

Team Galactic had put everyone on edge, however—trainers who went alone checked me out as I passed, wary eyes essaying the strength of my Buizel and checking my belt to see if I had any more poké balls with me. The number of thefts and robberies had gone up ever since Galactic had stepped out of the shadows, and not all of those crimes were caused by the Team's actual members. Trainers casually stretched as I passed them, their coats or sweatshirts or jackets lifting away from a row of poké balls so that I could see them clearly: a warning not to mess with them. Ozzy stuck close to me and suspiciously eyed anyone who came too close, growling softly and peeling her lips back from her sharp white teeth.

It was hard, of course, to really be afraid of the trainers. We kept to ourselves and didn't do much more than nod in passing to those whose eyes we met, but you couldn't help but see them as people. It was nearly two o'clock now, and people were stopping for lunch. Some had even spread picnic blankets over the ground. A lot of them had released their teams and were using wild pokémon as training devices, or else were camping a particular spot and challenging anyone who passed by. I politely declined all battles—a lot of the people challenging me had Electric-types and were thinking of Ozzy being an easy victory for them.

Which she would be, really, if it ever came to a battle.

I stopped to watch a few such battles, mostly because the day was hot and I really felt like taking a break from walking. I took off my baseball cap and idly flapped it in front of my face, trying to create a bit of a breeze, and tied the Milotic sweatshirt around my waist by its arms. When I removed my backpack from my shoulders, Ozzy immediately pounced on it and found the stuff that I'd packed as food—hardtack biscuits, peanut butter, a squeeze bottle of soda and another one of water, generic pokémon food...

My Buizel fell upon the soda and peanut butter like a creature who'd just survived a famine, and completely ignored the pokémon food. Typical. I made a disgusted face at her and snagged the plastic jar of peanut butter before she emptied it—that, or got indigestion.

"Hey! Hey you!" someone shouted. I turned around and looked up, and saw a girl running towards me—she was tan, but had pale blonde hair and bright green eyes. Jeans and a camisole along with sneakers completed her outfit.

"Yeah?" I asked.

The girl skidded to a stop in front of me, wheezing and panting. She rested for a moment and put her hands on her knees, trying to get her breath back.

"Is that... is that a Water-type?" she asked, gesturing towards Ozzy. The Buizel gave her a flinty stare and raised her peanut-butter stained paws into what must have been a fighting stance. I nudged her with my foot and hissed, "stop that!" out of the corner of my mouth. "Yep, she is," I replied to the girl. "Uh... why so interested?"

"My brother... my brother and I... we... were traveling together... my brother likes rocks and he was exploring a cliff side near Fuego Ironworks... he wanted something called malachite... the cliff was unstable... it fell on him..."

It's required that people who plan on becoming trainers take survival courses before they apply for a license. The woman who had taught me and some twenty other youngsters had had a penchant for describing injuries from various accidents in vivid, gory detail—crushed bones and flail chests had been among them. I grabbed the girl's shoulders and shook her as she straightened. "Did you have phones? Did you call someone?" I demanded. Her green eyes were reddish-tinted from crying, I noticed.

She gulped and nodded, getting her wind back. "Yeah, yeah we did," she said. "But they haven't arrived yet and we've been waiting since a little past dawn. My brother is dehydrated and we just ran out of water. I was wondering if you could... if you could please come with us and just, just stop him from getting heat stroke until the rescue team arrives?"

"I'll stay with you all the way to the hospital, if you want," I replied, quickly packing everything back up and slinging my backpack onto my shoulders. "Is your brother hurt really bad?"

The girl and I started jogging in the direction that she had come from. My legs burned and ached and felt like they were being filled with molten lead, but I persevered. My mother and sister might have gotten the brains of the family, but I had been the track-and-field coach's golden girl in school. Once I adjusted to running with a weight on my back, I would be going pretty fast.

The girl shook her head in negation to my question. "No, he's not. He's only halfway buried, actually—but I think his ankle's broken. Xander keeps on saying that it hurts, and he goes pale whenever my pokémon and I try to pull him out."

About fifteen minutes later, when my shoulders and legs were really trying to cop out of running any more, we took a side-track away from the main part of the Route and arrived at the site of the accident, passing a Rhyhorn that tossed its head when it saw the girl—a wave of her hand calmed it, however, so I assumed that it was her own pokémon.

Brother and sister looked a lot alike—same tan skin and white-blond hair, and they dressed alike as well. A worried-looking Cubone was sitting on a nearby rock, tapping its bone against the remaining part of the cliff side to make odd-sounding rhythms, and an Electabuzz was sending random electrical pulses flaring into the sky. It stopped, however, when it saw us.

The boy, Xander, wasn't trapped beneath the collapsed cliff, however. He was sitting in the shade, reading a novel with a dozing Eevee draped across his lap like a furry blanket. He looked up when we approached, marking his page and setting the book carefully aside.

I turned back to the girl, confused. "I don't understan—"

When I saw them, the girl's eyes were hard like chunks of iron ore. "Electabuzz!" she yelled, not taking her eyes away from me and smiling with her mouth only, "Use Thunder Wave!"

Ozzy slapped the back of my legs hard with her tails to warn me to get moving, becoming an orange streak that zig-zagged across the ground in a random pattern, combining a Quick Attack and a Water Gun to turn on the Eevee that now pursued her. Me? I just barely managed to duck behind a boulder in time for the Electabuzz's attack to be rendered harmless by the rock.

The Buizel knocked the Eevee's feet out from under her, made an impossible-looking twist, and bit the Normal-type's ear while attempting to claw out its eyes. The Eevee used a Sand Attack and a Tackle, blinding Ozzy in one eye and throwing her off of itself and into the dirt. Ozzy twisted upright and used another Water Gun when the Eevee attempted to use a Quick Attack, keeping the Normal-type away long enough for the Buizel to spring to her feet and become an orange streak once again. The Electabuzz, momentarily distracted from me by the fight, sent a Thunderbolt crashing after her. Ozzy dodged it by ducking under the Rhyhorn's belly, allowing the dual Rock/Ground-type to absorb the electrical attack. She sped away, whipped 'round a corner, and was lost from sight.

Just like that, my one and only pokémon abandoned me.

"Get the kid, Malleus!" Xander called, reminding me that this wasn't some battle where I simply lost and paid over some poké to the winner when my Buizel couldn't battle anymore—I scrambled to my feet and made a mad dash towards the way I had come from, but the Rhyhorn snorted and dragged its foot along the ground, looking ready to charge if I came much closer. I hesitated.

And as was typical in this sort of situation, over-focused on the one pokémon and forgot about the two smaller ones.

The Cubone swung its bone and knocked my legs out from under me, putting me flat on my back. I kicked at the pokémon, felt the Eevee's paws on my arm and heard a Growl by my ear. I grabbed blindly, felt small claws ripping the material of my cammy, hugged the pokémon to my chest and felt a bone hit hard against my leg as the Eevee determinedly gnawed at my the strap of my backpack, crazed by fear and battling into forgetting that human clothes weren't simply a second skin and therefore could not feel pain.

The bone thumped against my rear—humiliating, but that was where a lot of padding was anyway. It hurt like something I couldn't describe, but not a lot of actual damage was done. My fingers scrabbled over the Eevee's face, finding the softer spots where the eyes were, felt its Growl increase as I held my fingers over the lids.

"Call it off!" I screamed. "Call off your pokémon now or I swear I'll put out the Eevee's eyes!"

That was an utter lie. I'd never be able to do anything like that, ever. Just the _thought_ of doing such an act made my stomach roil. I doubted that I was in danger of throwing up, but the fact that I had a pokémon who hated me held in my arms, my fingers resting against its eyelids, was making me nauseous and disgusted by myself.

Hopefully, though, Xander and his sister didn't know that.

"Malleus, get back!" the boy said, definitely sounding panicky. I knew why, too: Eevee were rare and valuable thanks to all of the forms that they could evolve into. In Eterna Forest there was the Moss Rock, which he had probably been journeying towards so that his Eevee could evolve into a Leafeon. Of course, to evolve it would need to gain experience from battling while near the Moss Rock, and no pokémon would ever be able to battle successfully it if was blind—save Ghost or Psychic-types, of course, which the Eevee was most definitely not.

"The Rhyhorn too!" I yelled.

The girl called back the Rhyhorn, and the Cubone had already stopped standing over me, poised to strike. I got up, still holding the Eevee tightly but awkwardly. It kicked and squirmed in my grasp, snarling fitfully, but made no attempt to move its head and bite me—I'd read somewhere that it only took eight pounds of pressure to remove an eye from its socket. Apparently the Eevee knew that particular little factoid as well.

I backed slowly towards the main Route, my bum and leg hurting, the scratches I had gotten from the Eevee's claws and little sharp teeth stinging. My hand was the worst—I hadn't fallen on it this time, but the pain was enough to rob me of a good deal of alertness and a fair amount of intellect that was quite necessary in this sort of situation. I should have been paying better attention.

"I'm gonna go back to 205, and then I'm gonna let your Eevee go," I said, speaking loudly. "With lots of other trainers nearby, so that they can see what's happening." Not that there were all that many other trainers, but there would probably enough that at least someone would be a witness if Xander and his sister set their pokémon on me again. "And then..." I said, licking my lips, "And then we'll just go our own ways, without ever seeing each other again. No harm done."

"Don't hurt my Eevee!" Xander said, and right there I felt sorry for him. I was angry, sure, and I couldn't understand why they had decided to lure me here and attack me, but the concern that he had for his Eevee was genuine and completely unfeigned. The pokémon wasn't just a rare and valuable piece of a collection to him: he was looking at his Eevee like I was threatening to shove my fingers into his _own_ eyes rather than its, and for that I kind of pitied him.

And besides, I was mostly just angry with his sister.

The Eevee kept up its squirming, trying to work its way free, and it managed to extend one of its rear feet and kick my bandaged hand.

The pain was intense but not overwhelming, and I did nothing more than gasp harshly and slacken my grip for an instant. But an instant was all the Eevee needed: it twisted around in my arms and wriggled free, dropping to the ground and dashing over to Xander.

No plan survives contact with the enemy, then. I turned and ran, intending to simply pray that blind flight would save me, but only managed to get two steps before I literally tripped right over the Cubone and went sprawling.

"Malleus, do it now!" Xander ordered, and I felt the Cubone's club connect with my temple.

The world went dark.

* * *

**Malleus: a small bone in the ear, often referred to as the "hammer". In this case, used as a nickname for a pokemon.**

**Malachite: a mineral that can be found near copper mines, bright green in color. It's actually very pretty.**


	8. Restitution

If you're rendered unconscious from head trauma, you'll probably get a concussion if it was for more than a couple of seconds. That said, I was out for probably no more than a handful, but when I woke up my hair was frizzed like nobody's business and I could barely move.

Apparently that girl's Electabuzz had used its Thunder Wave on me after all. I was paralyzed.

My eyes were closed, but I slowly forced them open despite the static that was deadening every part of my body. It was hard to keep them that way, but I managed well enough to see my surroundings.

I was lying on the ground, on my side. I had on all my clothes, which was _always_ a good thing, and I didn't appear to have any injuries other than the general aches and pains that came from hiking hard and brawling with a pokémon who whacks you with bones.

I didn't have my backpack with me, which _wasn't_ good. Nor my wallet, which was worse. But my hands and feet didn't have any restraints, which was several different flavors of awesome. Of course, the paralysis was effectively rendering me all but immobile, so rope or shackles weren't really all that necessary to keep me from running away.

I was still in the same general area as where my disastrous fight with Xander and his sister had taken place: no grass or vegetation to be seen, and either loose dirt or bare rock. To the east and west were cliff faces, unclimbable but only twice the height of a man, and to the north was a smaller cliff that I could probably jump off of but not climb up. South and east lay the path that I had come along to reach this place, and the one that I would need to traverse again to escape here.

The Rhyhorn was out of my sight, which either meant that a) it was behind me and being quiet or b) its trainer had returned it to its poké ball, or else c) it was waiting along the path and was simply out of my sight in that direction. The Cubone, Eevee, and Electabuzz were out of their balls, however, and clustered around their trainers.

Who were in turn clustered around my backpack.

The sibling duo had gone through my things and were separating them into piles, debating which ones were worth taking and which should be left. I won't relate their entire conversation, since it went on for a good quarter of an hour and often rambled, but I learned that the girl's name was Cassandra.

They went through the journal that I had packed and read everything in it, which was embarrassing but not truly shameful. I made inventory lists and conjugated French verbs, and had a tendency to rant about the unfairness of life or the stupidity of my classmates, as well as accounts of major events in my life. There was nothing overly personal there, like a list of the boys I had been infatuated with at various points, though I found that the idea of these people having access to my private journal being nearly as uncomfortable as having my mind read.

They riffled through my wallet and took all of the money I had put there, but left my prescription for Ozzy's multivitamins (useless now since she had abandoned me, but they didn't know that) as well as my Trainer ID. Was that kindness?

They also looked through my pack, taking whatever they needed—this mostly constituted of the paralyze-heals, potions, and antidotes that I had bought with the money I had earned through mowing lawns, tending gardens, and babysitting. The products of four summers of work went down the drain faster than I could blink.

When Xander and Cassandra were finished, they left my ransacked backpack with my discarded possessions lying around it, shoving what they had taken into their own packs. I hastily closed my eyes again as Xander rose from his kneeling position and walked over to me, feigning continued unconsciousness. I could hear the crunching sound of his boots grinding little stones against each other with every footfall.

When I felt his shadow fall over me I opened my eyes the barest sliver. Xander was glaring down at me, his fists on his hips. "When my Eevee evolves into a Leafeon, I'm going to let her use Giga Drain to suck you dry," he hissed down at me.

Then Xander spat, and I felt a glob of warm spittle land on my skin and slowly trickle down my neck. He would have given me a good kick as well, but his sister grabbed him as he raised his foot and dragged him backwards so that the blow went wildly into the air rather than giving my midsection a good thump.

"Stop that!" she said to him, glaring murderously at her sibling. "The kid did what either of us would have done if the roles were reversed. And she didn't hurt Lydia at all, so quit your abuse. Go set up the next ambush in the place that we talked about."

Glaring at me over his shoulder, Xander stomped away to where his and his sister's packs were. As he bent down to pick them up, one in each hand, his Eevee sprang up to perch on his shoulder. My gaze flicked back to Cassandra, who was still standing over me.

Cassandra as well put her hands on her hips. "You can quit pretending to be asleep now," she informed me dryly. "Xander might be as blind as a Zubat, but I can tell."

No point in pretending, then. I dragged my eyes back open, as slow as a Slugma.

Cassandra hunkered down so that she was closer to my level. She didn't seem ready to mock me, or condescend me, or spit on me. She was serious, almost grim, but neither kind nor cruel. She reminded me a little bit of my mother.

"The paralysis should wear off in a couple of hours," she informed me. "You won't suffer any ill effects from it, and we left your food and all the essential supplies. You can make it back it Floaroma Town by about midday tomorrow if you hustle. I'm not going to apologize to you for what we did—we needed money and supplies to get through Eterna Forest and evolve my brother's pokémon, and wanted trainers can't exactly just waltz into a Poké Mart. Goodbye." She nodded to me, one professional to another, and then walked off after her brother.

And I was left alone.

* * *

There's nothing much to really _do_ when you're paralyzed, besides think. There wasn't much movement that I could manage beyond blinking and having my chest rise and fall as I breathed. I couldn't even roll into a more comfortable position on the ground.

I settled for watching the clouds go by overhead and hoping that I wouldn't get sunburned from just lying out in the open like this. That, and praying that no wild pokémon would wander by—if I was found by anything predatory, I was completely helpless to do anything to defend myself. That wasn't exactly the best recipe for survival.

One more thing: paralysis is very possibly the most boring thing in the world. You can't read, you can't sing, you can't listen to music, you can't even count your teeth with your tongue, it's so bad. There's simply nothing to do, and that was very probably the worst thing about it.

After the first ten minutes, I felt like I was going insane.

After the first twenty, I went to sleep.

* * *

Sometime later, when the sunlight streaming over the western cliff was considerably more ruddy than I remembered, I woke up. Unfortunately, as I tried to sit up, I discovered that I was still paralyzed—mostly. It _was_ starting to wear off, like Cassandra had said, but the most that I could do was loll my head from side to side and crawl slowly through the dirt, trying to get my limbs to obey me. I _barely_ had the coordination for crawling. Walking was out of the question.

I flopped around on the ground like a landed Magikarp, feeling thoroughly useless and frustrated with myself. Trying to talk, I discovered that my tongue wasn't working very well either: all I could manage were gobbling sounds, or inane baby talk that didn't even remotely resemble coherent speech.

I really, really wanted to cry. I hate to say it, but I did.

The tears were just beginning to well up and threaten to spill when a cream-and-orange-furred face popped up in front of me, revealing a bloodstained muzzle and a chipped-tooth snarl. It was a Buizel. Was it Ozzy, though? I didn't know. She _did_ have a habit of snarling into my face, but only when I ticked her off. Maybe this one was wild. Maybe I was going to die.

I opened my mouth to scream, and instead had something shoved between my teeth that I reflexively bit down on, so that it wouldn't go any further inside me. It burst—whatever it was—and flooded my mouth with the spicy taste of Cheri berry. As soon as the berries juices hit my tongue, it could move like it normally did. I spat out the pit, but swallowed the rest.

The Buizel sat back on its haunches to watch me, and I noticed the cast on one of its tails. Alright, so it _was_ Ozzy after all. And she had been intelligent enough to realize that I was paralyzed and gotten me a cure for it.

I sat up slowly, feeling the Cheri berry quickly washing away the effects of the paralysis. Ozzy and I looked at each other for a long time, until the pokémon dropped her gaze and idly drew patterns in the dirt with her claws as she avoided my eyes, pretending to be casual.

"Thanks for coming back," I said bitterly. "At least you're smart enough not to let your meal ticket expire." The words were harsh, but I didn't really know how else to feel besides angry and betrayed. My pokémon had abandoned me and left me to my fate. Xander and Cassandra could have _killed_ me if they'd wanted to. Ozzy probably knew that, from the way that she had performed her tactical retreat—she was experienced at not taking unnecessary damage, if nothing else. She had known that I might very well die if left unaided, and had run away regardless.

The Buizel flinched and turned away from me as I spoke, her shoulders tightening and a raspy growl rising in her throat. I sighed, then stood up and checked my watch: it was about five o'clock. Right now it was June, and the days were at their longest and the nights their shortest. There was still some daylight left, if I wanted to keep pushing and reach the eaves of Eterna Forest as night fell.

I knelt down by my supplies and carefully repacked them, checking everything for damage. When I looked inside my badge case, I wrinkled my nose. There were crushed Bluk berries in each cavity that would hold my badges. The berry's deep purple juices had already stained the cheap fabric lining the case and utterly ruined it. I would have to replace it as soon as possible, except that I had no money for even basic necessities like food.

I snapped the case shut with more force than was strictly necessary, and shoved it into my backpack almost like I wanted to hide it from my sight. I knew I shouldn't have gotten angry over that one little thing, but it was the most petty and malicious act that had been done to me all day and for some reason that made me very, very angry.

I hefted my backpack up and let the weight settle onto my shoulders. I wanted to run really fast, until I was sweating like a Grumpig and trembling from exhaustion. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to fight and scream and rage at the world for being so horribly unfair. I had an unreliable pokémon and all of my money had just been stolen by thugs. I was not the least bit extraordinary.

I was so ordinary that I felt physically sick.

I looked back at Ozzy and watched the Buizel trudge over to me, directing her bitter, angry gaze at the ground rather than at me, for once. Most of her stitches were torn, and the cast had gotten dirty. There was still dirt crusted around one eye from the Eevee's Sand Attack. A wound on her hip bled sluggishly and stained her orange fur scarlet.

Once more, I sighed and knelt, shrugging off my backpack and pulling out my first aid kit. "Stand still," I ordered dispassionately, pulling out iodine and bandages. I had never sutured, though there was a curved needle in the kit, and didn't trust the year-old lessons that had mostly faded from my mind. I wet a swab with iodine and wiped each wound, stolidly ignoring the way the Buizel flinched at the pain that the disinfectant brought her. I bandaged what I could, left open what I couldn't, and decided not to keep moving.

There wasn't any material for a fire here, which meant that my food would have to be cold. Otherwise, I didn't really mind—summer nights were warm almost to the point of unpleasantness right now, and I wouldn't even need my sleeping bag.

I got it out anyway, mostly just to provide a cushion between my bum and the dirt, sitting down carefully. The Cubone had bruised me there, however, so eventually I settled for lying on my stomach, holding my upper body out of the dirt by putting my weight on my arms. I cleaned out a baggy of coleslaw and pushed the peanut butter jar towards Ozzy.

She regarded it critically for a moment, then pushed it back towards me and moved away, curling up on a particularly rocky bit of ground with her back to me. I looked at her for a moment, then eventually shrugged and dug around in my pack for the novel that I'd packed with me, for quiet moments like this when there was nothing else to do.

I read for awhile, then opened up my journal and jotted down yesterday's and today's events. I needed to develop a code for this journal, now that I thought about it, so that if it was ever found by someone else ever again then they wouldn't be able to read it. I continued reading my book, then brought out my flashlight when the sun sank low enough that I needed extra illumination.

Thanks to my midday nap I wasn't really tired, so even when I realized that it would be better to conserve battery life and put away the flashlight, I didn't particularly feel like going back to sleep. It was now getting considerably dark, and I heard the call of a Hoothoot somewhere nearby: the nocturnal pokémon were waking up and going about their nightly business. Kricketot whined and chirruped, playing music that never seemed to have an identifiable source.

I leaned back against the cliff and closed my eyes, trying to make myself relax and go to sleep. Every noise brought me crashing back to full alertness, however, and eventually I gave up trying. When I glanced towards where Ozzy was, I could see her eyes glittering in the sparkle of light that managed to reach them as the last rays of the sun slipped below the horizon.

So she was awake as well.

I knew that we couldn't go on like this, her refusing food and companionship and me hating her. It wouldn't work. Sooner or later Ozzy would run off, deciding that it would be easier to search for her real trainer on her own, and she might very well leave me alone in the wilds, to be devoured by wild pokémon.

I didn't want to forgive the Buizel. I wanted to hate her for leaving me at the whims of a pair of thugs, and grind her nose in that fact until the shame ate her alive from the inside-out. I do my best to act mature, but there are some times when I really, really know I'm only ten years old.

Miranda would have handled this situation better.

I sighed again, swallowed my pride, and stood up, walking over to the Buizel and sitting down beside her. I needed to make amends, if not sincerely then at least so we could continue our partnership until I acquired another pokémon and she went back to Madison.

I tapped her shoulder and watched her deliberately turn her back on me. "I'm sorry," I said slowly, suddenly wishing that I had figured out more of this talk before I had started it. "I should have thanked you better. You really did help."

"Buizel," Ozzy replied in her bitted, angry voice, still not looking at me.

"No, I'm serious," I retorted. "It's... real, I mean. You couldn't have fought off all those other pokémon and did the only thing you could think of—it was the smartest thing to do, really, and it would be wrong to ask you to fight to the death for me. I shouldn't have gotten angry at you." I took a deep breath: "Please forgive me."

"Bui," Ozzy sighed, then sat up and gave another of her jerky nods that signified agreement. It was clearly an unnatural movement for her. There was a steely reservation in her eyes, however: I hadn't been entirely forgiven yet, but the apology had made our temporary arrangement bearable.

I huffed and leaned back against the rock face, staring up at the sky and the stars that were starting to become visible. Being a trainer was harder than I thought.


	9. Who's Afraid of the Dark?

We reached the eaves of Eterna Forest by about noon the next day, having gotten ourselves into no further incidents. There _had_ been one battle, but that had been against a boy who was just starting out on a training journey, one who didn't care about his Numel's double-weakness to Water-type attacks and was recklessly challenging anyone who passed him by. I had won easily, and gotten twenty poké for the victory.

Should I have described my first battle? I don't know. It wasn't very impressive, with Ozzy simply using her Water Gun from a distance until the poor Numel had fainted. The opponent's Ember attacks hadn't done much more than singed her fur in a few very small areas and annoyed her. I hadn't even bothered trying to direct Ozzy, primarily because she obviously knew what she was doing, and also a little bit because I doubted that she would listen to me if she thought that her judgment was wiser.

Ozzy had some of her pride as a competent protector and warrior restored, and I earned back a bit of my money. We ate lunch at the fringes of the forest, and I cut down on my food intake: Eterna Forest was famous for having trainers wandering through its tangles for _days_, lost and bewildered, until they were picked up by a pokémon ranger or else managed to find their way out on their own. In other words, I had planned to make it through the Forest in about a week, but didn't want to push my luck by gobbling down food that could be saved.

We went inside.

* * *

There is a reason, I think, that there are so many legends surrounding the forests of the world. I wasn't a city girl used to the sounds of traffic and blaring car horns, but the familiar sounds of Floaroma Town had become ingrained into some track of my subconscious. I always woke up early when I couldn't hear those sounds, something in the back of my mind warning me that all was not well in the world and that I should probably be awake for it.

Eterna Forest is an eerily silent place, filled with nothing but the soft whispering of trees. No Starly sing here, and no people laugh. Cascoon and Silcoon hug the tree branches, glaring at intruders suspiciously with red eyes, waiting for evolution. Wurmple threaten us by readying a Poison Sting attack, but are content to leave trespassers alone so long as they pass quickly. Occasionally, a Buneary shot across our path, startling us in its quickness and then vanishing back into the tangle of trees and long grass.

The Forest didn't seem to like us. I know it's silly to describe a bunch of trees standing around in one place as having emotions, but after awhile you couldn't help but feel that there was an undercurrent of resentment running through every trunk, every bough, every blade of grass. Humans did not belong here, would never belong here. We might have settled other parts of Sinnoh and tamed them, but this was a wild place, where only pokémon belonged.

It was a cool and shady area, where the sunlight came green after being filtered through the overhead leaves, filled with the clean, fresh smell of plants. No flowers, though, no sweet scents. Just the smell of growing things, that would do nothing if I died, that would take the nutrients from my decomposing body up through their roots and—

Stop that, I scolded myself. Quit it. You're doing nothing but scaring yourself. It's just a tree.

Ozzy and I didn't talk much, as we usually did, but I wouldn't have spoken all that more even if I'd had human companionship. This place wrapped silence around itself like a coat, forbidding all noise save what was natural to it, discouraging laughter and song and speech. When I _did_ speak to Ozzy, it was in a whisper.

I don't know how far we walked that day, picking our way between the trees. The Forest had a timeless quality to it, suggesting that even though the day progressed and evening was drawing on, no real time had passed at all. The rising and setting of the sun was immaterial, and the terrain never changed: trees, clearings, long grass in any place that had enough sunlight for it to grow. We might not have made any progress at all.

I cleared a space and gathered deadwood from the ground, too respectful of the _presence_ of the Forest hovering over us to dare to break branches from the living trees. After umpteen failed attempts with the matches in my backpack I finally got a fire going. Setting up the tent was less successful, however: I hadn't familiarized myself with the numerous poles, lines, and canvas before setting out, and the light was fading really fast now and making it hard to read the manual. After umpteen failed attempts that hadn't even gotten halfway completed before collapsing, I gave up in frustration and went back to sitting next to the fire, staring into the flames.

Ozzy didn't protest when I inched a little closer to her, warily eying the trees that seemed to loom over our small campsite. The sun was almost completely gone now, lost beneath the western rim of the world save for a hair-thin sliver, and the main source of light was now my fire.

It was really, really dark beyond the little circle of light, mine and Ozzy's shadows thrown out long behind us, but I wasn't scared.

Okay, fine, I _was_ scared. Like a lot. But I wasn't panicking and screaming or doing anything stupid like that. I did jump a little bit when the first Mothim swooped out of the trees, entranced by the light of the fire, but only watched it warily as it flapped its large wings and spiraled above our campsite.

Ozzy growled at the Mothim, but I laid a hand on her shoulder to stop her from going any further. "Just leave it," I whispered. "It's not doing anything to us." I wasn't the sort of trainer that went through areas looking for fights with wild pokémon—if they left me alone, then I was content to leave them alone as well.

There was a part of me that knew that Mothim were rare and valuable (not quite as much as an Eevee, but still...) and a dual Bug/Flying-type that would be absolutely _killer_ against Gardenia's team. I wished I had a poké ball to capture one.

Within fifteen minutes, two Dustox and a Mothim had joined the first pokémon, swooping and spiraling over the fire. Ozzy and I watched them silently. We weren't exactly _afraid_ of them, per say, but the fact that there were four wild pokémon flapping over our heads was slightly unnerving. The Dustox once swooped low and passed around the fire only a foot above the ground, and came so close to me that I could have reached out and grabbed it if I'd been stupid enough to want to do so.

After an hour, seven more assorted Mothim and Dustox came, filling the air above the campsite. Fortunately, they weren't fighting, and I watched more of them come out of the trees. Each pokémon ignored the Buizel and human huddling on the ground, preferring the company of each other over fighting us. Soon, there were so many of them that the edges of wings were constantly brushing my arms and back, and one time a Mothim used my head as a launching pad to get into the sky.

That was the final straw. After a whispered command to Ozzy, the Buizel used her Water Gun to extinguish the fire, sending a great gout of steam up into the sky. Our campsite was plunged into a darkness that was complete and total. I curled up on top of my sleeping bag as the Mothim and Dustox dispersed, and managed to catch a few hours of rest.

* * *

The next day I woke up late. I hadn't meant to, of course, but late nights do bad things to me and there are no alarm clocks in Eterna Forest. When I opened my eyes, there was sunlight falling over my face. It was also about nine o'clock, if my wristwatch was still accurate. I sat up and cracked my neck, rolling my shoulders and slowly stretching to work the lethargy out of my bones. What they don't tell you is that spending a night on the ground, even with a sleeping bag as padding, makes you sore as heck.

Ozzy was curled up next to the remains of the fire pit, putting her almost impossibly flexible spine to good use so that the tips of her tails were touching her nose. I knew that I would probably be maimed if I told her, but she honestly did look adorable right then.

The Buizel cracked an eye open when I stood up, then rolled over on her back and stretched. The stretched started with her tails and ended with her ears, and by the time she had completed it she was fully awake. I gave her a vitamin from the bottle and broke camp (what there was of it) and ate a protein bar as we continued our trek through the wilderness.

Nothing terribly interesting happened to us that day, really. Eterna Forest continued being just disconcerting enough to put me on edge, and a wary truce continued to exist between the wild pokémon and myself—we disturbed as little as we could and moved quickly, and they left us alone. Ozzy and I weren't attacked. It was colder in here than it was outside of the Forest, and I was glad for the Milotic sweatshirt.

I stopped for the day when there was still a good bit of daylight left in the sky, and spent a good hour and a half learning how to set the tent up—first with the manual, then without. Ozzy, figuring out what I was trying to learn, brought me a shirt that I could use as a blindfold. I took in her flat expression as she handed it over and realized that she was being sarcastic.

As for how me and her were doing... 'okay' would be a good descriptor. We weren't good, we weren't great, and I doubt that awesome could ever be achieved with even the most ideal of circumstances, but we were doing okay. She wasn't snarling and growling at me anymore, and I wasn't cracking jokes that she didn't appreciate. We were both dancing around each other, trying to make our arrangement work—Ozzy because she needed me to get back to her trainer, me because I needed a pokémon to further my journey of becoming extraordinary.

Night fell, and we ate dinner. Ozzy decided that she liked the lemony, Pikachu-shaped vitamins best and refused to even _try_ the orange-flavored Torchic ones. I rolled my eyes and started the fire, now vowing only to use it during the daytime, and made tea. I'd gotten the teabags because they'd been light and hadn't taken up much space, and because I liked peach tea. Ozzy decided that she had to try this too, and ended up finishing half of the pot—and the only reason she got half was because I refused to let her drink any more.

The fire was dowsed and the light started to fade, and I crawled into the tent. I remember getting out my novel and starting to read before the memory trails off into vagueness, so I think I must have fallen asleep sometime while I was reading: trekking through a creepy forest tires you out, it really does. Not just the physical exertion, but just the fact that I was constantly on edge and expecting something to leap out at me.

Either way, I fell asleep reading a book. When I woke up again, it was completely dark outside. We were under the cover of the trees now, since there was no convenient clearing that I found to pitch the tent in, and there was not even moonlight to see by.

"Buizel," Ozzy whispered raspily, right beside my ear. I flinched in shock, then made a shushing movement. Why had I woken up in the first place? I wasn't very uncomfortable, and the night was warm. And why had Ozzy sounded so _worried_? Normally, if something put her on edge then it also ticked her off, and she got angry and fought it. If I hadn't known the Buizel better I would have thought that she was _scared_.

But that was impossible, right?

I was just debating the merit of trying to go back to sleep, rather than attempting to differentiate between the different shades of black that filled the Forest, when I heard it: the laughter. Laughter is a normally a happy sound, and this was no exception. It was just also shrill, cackling, and utterly insane.

I gulped. Ozzy pressed herself against my shoulder, her body going tense as a wooden plank as she stared into the darkness.

The laughter came again, this time closer than it was before. Colored lights flashed on the tree trunks off to the west and something—I think it was a Buneary—screamed.

There was no question about what I was going to do now. Ozzy and I dove into the small tent without hesitation, zipping the flap closed and huddling in the tense, small space. My pokémon, normally quite disdaining of me, was clinging unashamedly to my arm.

The laughter came _again_, and this time from right outside the tent. It wasn't as loud as before, however, and now was nothing more than a low, dark chuckle that made a shiver drag its way up my spine with icy fingers. I whimpered and closed my eyes, and felt Ozzy digging her claws into the flesh of my arm as she clung even tighter.

There was merciful silence for about forty-five seconds. I didn't dare relax.

Then it came, the unmistakable sound of a zipper moving. My eyes snapped open, and I watched as whatever was outside slowly and painstakingly began _unzipping the tent flap_.

I screamed. I screamed very loudly and fumbled with my flashlight, struggling to get it out of my backpack and then to turn it on. When I did, the bright beam illuminated the inside of the tent like a miniature sun, and I pulled the tent flap the rest of the way open and stumbled outside, waving the flashlight like a sword.

There was nothing there. Absolutely nothing to be found. Whatever had been trying to get at us, it was gone now. It might come back, but it was gone for now.

Ozzy and I stayed awake for the rest of the night, keeping the flashlight on even when the wings of Mothim and Dustox beat against the walls of the tent.


	10. The Best Laid Plans

Several days passed in rapid succession. There was no clear path through Eterna Forest, but I knew that Eterna City lay north and east of the entrance point, so I kept myself going in that direction with the compass that dangled around my neck on a string, much like Amelia's silver-and-crystal necklace. Except more useful. And probably less expensive.

Every night, the... the _thing_ came back to haunt us like a vengeful spirit, laughing and cackling and generally preventing Ozzy and I from getting much sleep. I began referring to it as the Creeper, just because I needed to have a name for what was trailing us.

The Creeper was one of the few conversational topics that could be discussed between Ozzy and I, as we bantered back and forth about what it might be. I _wanted_ the explanation that Miranda had set an insane Psychic-type on me as soon as she got the news from my mother that I was training, but that was probably unlikely. If Miranda had wanted to kill me she would have made her Kadabra Teleport to my location, then leave five minutes later once it had overloaded my mind with enough Psychic-type attacks that a blood vessel in my brain burst.

I know my sister. She probably _would_ do something like that, if I made her angry enough.

The more likely explanation for our mysterious demon, however, was that the Creeper was a Ghost or Dark-type, something that was either native to the area or else had been released by/escaped its trainer. Ozzy and I didn't know, though we did care about the issue with a deep and burning passion.

Not getting enough sleep makes us both cranky, and the Buizel had started using pressurized water to blast Wurmple out of the trees whenever they hissed at us and readied their Poison Sting attacks. Or at least, she had done so for the first few days, when even speaking to her was an incentive to homicide that she couldn't take out on her temporary trainer.

Now, five days into Eterna Forest and going by energy reserves we hadn't known we had possessed, we were a pair of zombies who stumbled blindly through the woods by day, desperately praying for sight or sound of the end of the Forest. I was dead on my feet and dully cursing the Creeper with every step, whatever it was, who only allowed us a few precious hours of sleep every night.

Eventually, on the dawn of the sixth day, Ozzy and I gave in and didn't bother breaking camp. Instead, we crawled back into the tent and collapsed on my sleeping bag, simply going back to sleep and praying that our demon wouldn't be inspired to haunt us during the daytime.

As it turned out, the Creeper was nocturnal—we got a full day's rest and woke up around mid-afternoon, and hiked for an hour or two before setting up the tent again. Ozzy was back to her usual I-hate-the-world-and-am-going-to-inflict-PAIN state of sleeplessness, which basically made her more useful than a machine gun with an unlimited amount of ammunition. Me? I drank tea by the fireside and watched the sun set in the west, trying to plot out a suitable attack strategy for defeating the Creeper.

It had to be done. Unlike our stalker, Ozzy and I weren't nocturnal and couldn't see in the dark worth beans. We would be stumbling around blind if we tried to sleep during the day and travel by night, tripping over tree roots and angering every wild pokémon within a three mile radius. And the Creeper would be dogging our every step, I was sure of it.

Eventually, though, I thought of something that seemed likely, and called Ozzy over so that we could discuss the plan.

* * *

When night fell, Ozzy and I had packed up the tent and were sitting on the sleeping bag, with me idly toying with the flashlight. After the first night both of us had realized it was better to conserve the thing's batteries, and so had endured the nights of terror in the dark.

It hadn't been fun.

Each night the Creeper had done something different. There would be colored lights, screaming from some poor frightened pokémon, and the insane laughter of the Creeper. One night, I found a trio of Buneary lying dead in front of the tent. They hadn't been killed violently—in fact, it looked like they had simply... stopped. Except for the expressions of utter horror on their furry faces, of course.

Was it possible to die of fear?

The next night, the outside of the tent had been splashed with blood. Ozzy had just looked at me weird when I broke out in hysterics, and eventually had to force me to get close enough to smell the substance on the wall of the tent—it was nothing but berry juice, though it had the exact color of dried blood. From a particularly shadowy clump of bushes, I thought I heard a cackle of delight.

Of course, when Ozzy sprayed the bushes with a particularly powerful Water Gun, there was nothing there. There never was.

I don't need to describe the rest of it, seeing as you've got the gist of the sort of tricks that the Creeper played and used to keep us awake, or the surprises that greeted us with every new dawn. After our rest, Ozzy and I were extremely ticked off, and more than ready for our revenge.

So we sat. And waited. And watched the sunset until it was totally dark.

I ended up waiting for over half an hour, with only a jab in the ribs from Ozzy stopping me from dozing off on several occasions. There was an ominous chuckle right beside my ear. I turned my head, but saw nothing. Something pulled Ozzy's tails, and the Buizel turned around with the intention of ripping the face off of whatever had dared to violate her personal space. She found nothing.

Colored lights played across the trunks and leaves of nearby trees—bright yellow, and light green. These turned out to be little spheres of light, which danced and spun tantalizingly close to us. Ozzy reached out a paw and batted at one. It zipped out of reach and hung there, silently tempting the poor Buizel. I nearly laughed, but then a green one appeared in front of me.

I am not a kleptomaniac, I swear. As soon as I saw that bright little sphere, however, I knew that I just _had _to have it. I didn't care what it was, or what it would do if I caught it—I just wanted it. Badly. When I tried to grab the darn thing, however, it floated out of my reach. I got to my feet and ran after it, not bothering to check and see if the Buizel followed me, crashing through the woods in pursuit of my sphere.

Everything kept tilting oddly to one side, and it was like I was seeing double—that, or trying to navigate by following my reflection in a funhouse mirror. There were copies of trees everywhere. I giggled at them, and then erupted into howls of laughter when an annoyed Wurmple sent a String Shot straight into my face, covering my skin and hair with sticky threads. I tripped over a stick and fell down, straight onto my hand.

I wasn't laughing after that.

* * *

Whatever the Creeper was, I now knew one thing: it was capable of using the move Confuse Ray on its opponents. After lying on the ground in agonizing pain for several long minutes, biting back screams, I cleaned off the String Shot threads as best I could—some were stuck in my hair worse than chewing gum would have been, and couldn't be removed unless I cut them out. Poor Amelia: she'd paid for my haircut, and I couldn't even keep it for six days in a row.

But I was evading the issue.

What was more important was that I was lost, alone in Eterna Forest at night. I didn't know where my pokémon was, or what she was doing, or whether the Creeper had eaten her or something.

I hunkered down to wait out the night, and could only hope that my Buizel had a good sense of smell and might sniff out my trail—I knew that it was a slim chance that she had the nose of a Growlithe, but a slim chance was better than no chance at all. I didn't sleep, despite the fact that the Creeper had apparently decided to leave me alone: thoughts of the demon tormenting Ozzy kept filling my head, a new one popping up as soon as I was about to drift off and terrifying me into full wakefulness.

Sometime around midnight, a Hoothoot alighted on a nearby tree branch. Its red eyes glowed, but I knew from its cry and the shape of its body what it was—the Creeper couldn't be this creature. I watched it watching me, settling my back more comfortably against a tree trunk and wrapping my arms around myself, nestled between two roots that ran out on either side of me. The Hoothoot was eating something that I didn't want to know about. It might have been a Cascoon or Silcoon, but I wasn't sure. Either way, it took a good couple of hours before it flew off into the gloom. I watched it, then went back to my long and sleepless vigil.

I _did_ manage to catch some rest that night, about an hour before dawn, but awoke only thirty minutes later because a Buneary was trying to investigate my backpack. I shooed it away and hugged my pack to my chest, and that half hour was the only bit of sleep I had. When the dawn came, my body was like "okay, Creeper's gone for sure, let's catch some Z's and make up for that lost time". I couldn't listen to it, however much I wanted to. I _needed_ Ozzy. The Buizel that was temporarily mine was _extremely important_.

Searching for her, however, was difficult. After five days of travel I knew that Eterna Forest was a big place, and that everything looked the same. I couldn't have retraced my steps back to the old campsite if I tried—and I did try, I really did. I spent half of the morning trying to get back there, praying to Arceus and Mew and whatever deities there were that I might miraculously find my pokémon along the way.

When I found the Creeper, I was going to kill it. Slowly. With a spoon.

I wandered through Eterna Forest for an _entire day_, searching for my pokémon. At first I was cautious: the thought of being attacked by a wild creature absolutely terrified me. However, my caution was soon swept away by a sense of desperation. I would be nothing without my Buizel: a failed trainer, who had given up before she had even gotten her first Gym Badge. I desperately needed to find Ozzy. Soon I was calling through the woods, shouting her name as loudly as I could in a vain hope of getting her attention.

Most of the wild pokémon left me alone, despite the fact that I was crashing through their territory. Not many of them were strong or clever enough to take on a human and successfully kill them, and there were a lot of novice trainers moving through the area every summer. The pokémon here had learned to be wary of mankind, for the most part. There were Wurmple and Budew, Hoothoot, Mothim, and Dustox at night, as well as Beautifly, Buneary, Cascoon, and Silcoon. You didn't get many other pokémon in the Forest, save the odd Misdreavus and Murkrow.

"Ozzy!" I called, walking forward steadily. It was about two o'clock, and I was getting nervous. How much time was I willing to spend combing Eterna Forest for a lost Buizel? I was running out of food and really did need to get out of here. I _could_ simply leave her and head to Eterna City, stocking up on supplies and then coming back... but I had seen how well the Buizel fared by herself in the wild: she's probably end up dying before I found her.

I had to keep searching until she was back in my company.

I took another step forward, felt my foot catch on something, and stumbled once before I righted myself and looked back. Tangled around my hiking boot was a white, sticky thread about as thick around as my pinky finger. It was determinedly clinging to my boot and wouldn't let me go.

I was, of course, suitably confused by this. I mean, what kind of pokémon lived in Eterna Forest but also knew the move Spider Web?


	11. Correcting Mistakes

No matter how many classes you take, how many talks you listen to, or how many books you read, you will always be unprepared for _something_. There was no pokémon anywhere west of Mt. Coronet in Sinnoh that knew the move Spider Web, there simply _were not_. I'd read a lot of material on the Forest before actually entering it, wondering what kind of Bug-type I could catch to fight against Gardenia's team, and no Spinarak or Ariados dwelt here. I was absolutely certain of that.

But there was also no denying the fact that the signature move of that evolution chain had been applied liberally all over this corner of the Forest. There were webs _everywhere_—as well as silk-bound cocoons, signifying captured prey. I stared at these for a long time, trying not to imagine what was inside.

I grabbed a nearby leaf, a beech leaf wide enough to shelter my entire hand, then cautiously untangled the thread from my boot. I hadn't read very much about the Spinarak evolution family: they were all far away, contained within the Battle Zone far to east of here, but I knew from regular spiders that tension in their webs told them whether they had caught prey or not: struggle a lot, and the thrashing would alert the spider that something was going on in their web and provoke it into investigating.

I did my best not to struggle. When I finished, I stepped cautiously away and stood regarding the webs, trying to decide what to do. Though it was a frightening thought, Ozzy might be in there, poisoned and tied up in a silk cocoon, waiting to be devoured.

Did I have the skill to fight off a horde of Ariados and Spinarak, if they so chose to appear? No. Absolutely not. I wouldn't last five minutes. Someone had brought these pokémon here and released them, maybe deliberately or maybe accidentally. Either way, I wouldn't be able to stand up to them.

I needed to go further into the tangle of webs, where they got thicker and more numerous, if I wanted to try and find my Buizel. As I thought about it, the idea of her being here grew stronger and stronger in my mind, until I was absolutely certain that Ozzy was somewhere nearby, being held prisoner by the Spinarak.

I took a deep breathe and then inched cautiously forward, warily keeping an eye on my surroundings so as to be sure that the landscape didn't suddenly sprout eight-legged monstrosities. For several long moments, I waited to see if anything would appear.

Nothing did. I slowly began moving forward again, stepping around the sticky trap-threads with all the delicacy of a ballet dancer, ducking low under the webs that hung suspended between the branches of the trees. After a few minutes of progress I began to notice the difference between two types of thread: one was plain white, and not sticky. The other was sort of shiny, and looked like it had been coated in some sort of glue so that it _was_ sticky. The former sort of thread was what the Ariados used to get around on their webs, and the latter was to ensnare prey.

It was weird, how much I was learning about eight-legged pokémon. Maybe I would be able to put this knowledge to good use someday.

If I got out of here alive, of course.

The nearest cocoon was about seven yards away, suspended from the branches of an oak tree. It was big enough to contain several Buizel, and I made my way over to it and prodded it gently. The threads that the cocoon had been woven from were dry, soft, and faintly warm to the touch. Ew.

I pulled a pocketknife out from my backpack and flicked it open, using the three-inch blade to make a long slit in the cocoon. Very, very cautiously (there was a part of me that was aware that I might have mistaken an egg sac for a prey-containing cocoon, and that I was possibly about to unleash an army of baby Spinarak) I grabbed the edges and opened it.

Out of the opening I had made a grinning skull loomed, and I noticed that there were maggots squirming in the eye sockets right before the corpse fell on top of me.

* * *

To my credit, I did not scream. However, I _did_ fall backwards and whimper very shrilly, shoving the partially-decayed carcass off of me as fast as I could and frantically brushing off my clothes, shuddering violently all the while. I kicked the body away from me for good measure, then looked around to see if the disturbance had attracted the unwanted attention of any Ariados.

Still nothing. The corpse smelled like... well, like what you expected rotting meat to smell like. My stomach climbed up into my throat as the stink hit me, and I had to turn away from it and breathe deeply through my mouth for several moments, trying to think of other things in order to keep my food down. When I could manage myself, I turned back to look at it.

The skeleton had shrunk and was shriveled and twisted, the jaw hanging loose and the clothes now too large. Greyish-yellow bone was exposed in places. I won't describe much more, since I did my best not to remember what it really looked like and therefore have no great detail to put down in writing. Either way, the corpse had once been a man, to judge by the short hair that was still attached to the scalp, and it had a row of grimy poké balls attached to its belt.

I wanted to pick up the balls and release whatever was inside them, but I really didn't know how the former trainer's pokémon would react to me—they might think _I_ had murdered their trainer and would avenge his death by killing me. After a few moments of fierce mental debate, I picked them up and put them in my backpack. Once I got to Eterna City I would turn them over to the Pokémon Center and Nurse Joy. She would know what to do with them.

I opened three more cocoons, with just as much success as the first. Two of the cocoons contained the husks of pokémon native to Eterna Forest who had fallen victim to the hunger of the Ariados. The other one contained the corpse of a young boy, probably of the kind who was obsessed with catching Bug-type pokémon. I got out his Trainer ID and realized that he was no older than I was.

I retreated out of the maze of Spider Web and made my solitary camp a good distance away, not daring to light a fire for fear that the smell of smoke would draw the Spinarak to me. I ate a few mouthfuls of food, noting that I was now down to two days worth of rations before I had to start foraging, or starve.

I curled up on the ground at the base of a tree and slept as well as I could as night came around, tossing and turning in the grips of uneasy dreams that involved ever-hungering spiders. I woke frequently, at every little noise that I heard, and had a hard time dropping back into sleep. Finally, though, I found a good reason to stay awake when two of the poké balls attached to my belt broke open while I was asleep.

Something poked my nose. "C'mon, little human," it snickered. "Wakey wakey, don't you want some eggs and baccy?"

I slowly opened my eyes and saw a bipedal purple pokémon with red eyes grinning down at my position on the ground. It had jabbed my nose with a lollipop. "Hello, little girl," the Gengar purred at me, "Would you like a piece of candy?"

This time, I did scream.

"Shut up, shut up," a Chatot sang, perching on my head and digging its talons into my scalp. "Shut up, shut up," it repeated, until I obeyed it and stopped screaming.

"Thank you, Elvis," the Gengar giggled, waving at the Chatot. The parrot pokémon preened, then took off from my head to perch on a nearby branch where it could watch us both.

"How—how come you can talk?" I demanded, staring wide-eyed at the Gengar.

"Because I can," the Ghost-type shot back. "How come you can speak English?"

"Um..."

"Exactly," the Gengar giggled, nodding sagely. "Now, what did you do with Trainer? Tell us, or I'll Curse you. And if you lie, I'll think of something worse."

"Who?"

"Trainer, trainer, trainer," the Chatot sang.

"Our trainer," the Gengar said. "Him. Why aren't we with him? Who are you? Did you _steal_ us?" The Ghost-type waved its lollipop in my face as though reprimanding me, still grinning hugely.

"No!" I yelped, in answer to the last question.

"Well, that's good at least," the Gengar said. "Now, where are we?"

"Eterna Forest."

"Ooh, that was quick. Do you want a gold star? No, wait, I don't have any. Too bad! Next question! What season is it?"

"Summer."

"Interesting. Last I remembered, it was autumn. But the leaves are green, so you can't be lying and I can't Curse you. Bummer. Next: what, precisely, is your relationship with Trainer? More specifically, why isn't he here? You have ten seconds."

"I don't know..."

"Eight! Seven!"

"I don't know your trainer at all! I was looking for my pokémon and there was this corner of the forest that the Ariados have taken over and there were all these cocoons and I thought that she might be in one so I opened four and there were corpses and I found some poké balls with them and I took those because I was afraid!"

The Gengar rocked back on its heels, snickering. "Looks like Trainer made a mistake, letting Vishnu out of her ball without us around. I _told_ Trainer not to trust that arachnid, but oh no, he insisted on making friends..." it laughed bitterly and wrapped its stubby arms around itself as the Chatot whistled a funeral dirge.

"I'm sorry," I said, gingerly reaching out to pat the Ghost-type on the back. It dodged nimbly away from me before I could touch it, its huge smirk still in place.

"Better let the others out, little human," it cackled. "They'll want to know about what happened to Trainer. I'll stop them from hurting you... maybe. Well, I will if they don't do anything entertaining. But whatever! Let them out!" The Gengar capered between the trees, laughing madly to itself all the while in a way that reminded me of the Creeper. "Go on! Go on!" it urged me when I hesitated.

I reached into my backpack and brought out the other four poké balls, clicking the buttons one by one. A Magmortar, a Meganium, an Azumaril, and a Scyther appeared, each of them turning towards me with varying levels of aggression before the Gengar cackled at them in their own language. I shrank back against the tree and did my best not to cower too much, even after it was explained to each pokémon that I wasn't a threat to them.

"Well, well, well..." the Gengar said, hopping down and sitting beside me. "Looks like Vishnu has been living the high life while we were stuck in our balls. Terrible! And she didn't think to share at all!"

"Is... is Vishnu what the Ariados was named?" I asked timidly.

"Yep. Trainer was always a little bit odd when it came to names. Poor him. Now Vishnu's had him for supper—maybe she didn't like being named after a Hindu god?" It giggled, then continued: "We'll clean up his mess for him, like he would have wanted. Magdalene—the Magmortar—will take care of a lot of that... but we have a job for _you_, little human, and you'd better not mess it up."

"Okay," I said weakly.

"Now, Badslash the Scyther—I _told_ you he was terrible with names, didn't I?—knew Vishie best before she turned traitor. She had a clutch of eggs coming when last we saw her, and I'll bet my bones that those eggs will have hatched by now. Am I right, or am I _right_?"

"You're right," I said, trying to imagine the sheer amount of Spider Web that had been used to create that sticky maze, and realizing that one spider couldn't have produced it all.

"Hehehe. Good! More for us to battle. And I bet that she's been ambushing every human she comes across and... well, you opened the cocoons, you should know. At least, you should if you aren't stupid. Are you stupid? Hmmm, maybe. Anyway, there should be cocoons with humans in them. Maybe some will still be alive. Maybe they won't. If they are, get them out while we hold the horde's attention. At least try. Vishie's kind breed fast, and she might be a grandmother by now. How disgusting! You'll have to be quick, little human. We might not get rid of them all before they pump us full of toxins and eat our hearts and livers! Too bad, too bad! Hop, skip like a Buneary!"

I shook my head slowly, trying to understand. "Why are you doing this?" I asked. When the Gengar just grinned at me and waited, I continued. "I mean, why do you care about your trainer now that he's dead?"

The Scyther hissed angrily at me, but the Ghost-type giggled. "I never really liked Trainer. He was slow and stupid and didn't appreciate my jokes. But he made me strong! He let me battle! I saw new places and terrified new people with him! It was fun. Now it's over. All because silly little Vishnu couldn't stand the idea of doing what she was told. We need to teach her to be behave—and that she can't get away with killing her Trainer. Any more pointless questions, little human, or are you ready?"

"I... I'm ready. I think."


	12. By Fire and Venom

**Please Note Before Reading: this chapter contains more violence than in other chapters. If you are uncomfortable reading such, please feel free to PM me for a summary of the chapter that will explain events without making you uncomfortable. Also, if you read this chapter and feel that the rating should be bumped up to M because of it, please say so.**

* * *

The Meganium's name, I learned, was Lois, and the Azumarill had been called Azul by her trainer. The Gengar's name was Nihtgenga. There was also Elvis the Chatot and Badslash the Scyther, as well as a Magmortar named Magdalene. I want to record their names before too much time passes, so that I don't forget them.

We walked as a group towards Vishnu's lair, with myself sandwiched between the Meganium and the Magmortar, the Chatot perched on my shoulder. It was constantly whistling, or else singing snatches of songs, and it would trill happily whenever I correctly guessed what song it was performing. The Beatles seemed to be a favorite.

I can understand why people become pokémon trainers, despite the danger and heartache. _This_, the feel of walking side-by-side with powerful creatures, ones that you yourself had raised and trained into greatness... it was a heady feeling. I hadn't trained these pokémon myself and they made it abundantly clear just who was in charge, but the barest taste that I got of the pride and happiness was enough to have me almost dizzy with want.

That was what extraordinary felt like, I was certain.

So we walked, and I watched wild pokémon flee from us with a small curl of warm satisfaction inside my chest. The night was crisp but not cold, and the moon was full with enough light for me to—just barely—see by. The Gengar's red eyes glowed in the darkness like a pair of crimson lamps.

"Little human, don't trip over that root—oh, too late," Nihtgenga said, giggling to itself. I glared at the Ghost-type for a moment, getting my balance back, but then the Scyther held an arm in front of my chest to prevent me from going any further.

Shiny white trap-threads snaked across the ground in front of me, strung between the trees like gross parodies of party decorations, woven into intricate patterns by Vishnu and her brood. The Spider Web only got thicker as it went on.

"Now, Magdalene," the Gengar commanded in a faux-whisper.

"Mortar," the Magmortar rumbled with a nod, and breathed a Flamethrower that bathed the night in scarlet and gold. I would have liked to watch that, to see the webs blacken and crumble to ash, to hear the first shrieking death-cries of the Spinarak, but I was already running to one side, towards the nearest cocoon with my pocketknife in my hand.

I slit it open and pulled the edges, stepping to one side as the contents spilled out onto the ground. A trainer and his Noctowl, both dead. On to the next one—an unfortunate Hoothoot. The next six were all pokémon native to Eterna Forest, and the seventh was a boy who had died so recently that he hadn't even begun to decay, and I checked his neck and wrist for a pulse before moving on.

The eighth was a Beautifly who was woozy with spider-venom, but still alive. I watched it drop to the ground and shakily get airborne, flapping off into the night. My first live one—good. After that I fell into a routine, moving from cocoon to cocoon and opening each one, letting the pokémon stagger out if it was alive and well enough to walk. The ones small enough for me to carry and too weak to move I hauled to the edge of Vishnu's territory, beyond the trap-threads, and left in the shadows of trees or bushes. Larger pokémon I left where they were. It sounds heartless, but what could I really do when there was so much that needed to be done and a limited amount of time in which do it? I found no live humans—they were scarcer prey than pokémon, and none had been caught recently enough to appreciate any help that was given to them.

Once, though, I did find an egg-sac. I couldn't tell the difference between a sac and a cocoon, and found dozens of pale green ovals with black markings on them rather than a dead person or pokémon. It's difficult to tell of what I did next, since I dislike remembering it, but I crushed the eggs beneath my boots so that they burst. Call me cruel, if you wish, but I was thinking of corpses with maggots crawling in their eyes as I did that, and maybe it was justified.

I didn't need to be cautious as I went about my business: all of Vishnu's brood were drawn to the Gengar and his teammates, and so long as I didn't make myself too obvious they let me be and passed me by, heading towards the greater threat. I always knew where the Magmortar was, because of the bright orange glow that surrounded the area where she and her friends were. The Azumarill was putting out the fires once the flames had done their work, so that all of Eterna Forest wasn't set ablaze—clever, that. I went back to my job, keeping one eye on the destruction and hoping that the pokémon I had joined forces with were okay.

I tried not to think too much about what I was doing: if I thought about it I would cry, or vomit, or go into hysterics, or realize just precisely what I was doing and lose my resolve (and maybe also my last meal). So I didn't think, just acted, and the Magmortar must have been getting closer to my location because I could smell smoke in the air and feel heat at my back. Best not to get caught in the inferno. I worked faster.

When I found the corpse of a Buizel, I think that my heartbeat stuttered and nearly stopped: it was decayed and rotting, fresh enough that it was still bloated and hadn't yet been used as a meal by the spiders. But it also didn't have a cast on either of the tails, and when I realized that I suddenly remembered how to breathe and could move on.

The night wore on, and the entire thing couldn't have lasted more than twenty minutes. But it felt like twenty lifetimes, because I was living moment by moment and high on adrenaline, my eyes watering from smoke and trying not to gag on the smell of roasting spider-flesh. I was attacked by a Spinarak once, and nearly had my leg in its mandibles before the Scyther flitted down in front of me and swung its arms, severing several of the Spinarak's legs and thereby diverting its attention from me.

I ran away from the Spinarak and the Scyther, moving to the next cocoon and making a huge slit in it. Out of the cocoon tumbled a girl, who grasped weakly at my shoulders so as not to fall face-first onto the ground. I felt my heart soar in my chest: she was alive!

Very weak and sick, but alive. Oh, thank Arceus...

I dragged her upright and grabbed her shoulders to keep her steady, trying to make her eyes focus on me. "Hey," I said, shaking her gently, "Hey, I need you to stand up on your own. Can you do that? Can you stand?"

She nodded blearily, clutching onto me for support for a moment before letting go. The girl—I call her girl, but she must have been a teenager of at least fifteen—was swaying on her feet, but standing. She had a pack on her shoulders.

"Do you have a knife?" I asked her. "Something to cut with?" I showed her my own, the blade crusted with the goo that Spinarak used to make their Spider Web sticky. Her eyes focused on it, and she nodded again.

"I need you to get out your knife and cut open the cocoons, okay? Get it out, and open up the cocoons. There might be people in them, or pokémon. Do you understand? Cut up the cocoons?"

She nodded again. I couldn't see her face very well in the ruddy light from the Magmortar's fire, but she seemed capable of coherent thought. I patted her on the shoulder and left her there, zipping away into a clutch of shadows towards the next target.

I saw the Meganium go down, slowed by poison and sheer weight of numbers, and heard the Scyther scream in rage when it saw as well. The Bug-type attacked with new fury, and the Magmortar sprayed fire over the Spinarak and Ariados that crawled over the Meganium's corpse, simultaneously cremating its fallen comrade and taking out a dozen foes.

Something stabbed at my back and I fell, straight onto a trap-thread that stuck to the front of my sweatshirt. I felt something huge standing above me and twisted around, entangling myself further, and from this angle I saw a huge, bloated Ariados looming above me, venom dripping from its clicking mandibles. Its eyes looked down at me, and I could see the hunger and hate within them. I screamed, because there was nothing to do but scream, and hacked at it with the tiny knife in my hand in a way that might have seemed pathetic if I'd stopped to think about it. I gave the Ariados a shallow cut across its mouth and a kick to the abdomen, and the spider made a clicking sound that I was fairly certain was laughter.

Its venom burned holes in my sweatshirt like acid, and I watched as though in a dream as its maw drew closer—because I was only ten, just a kid, and kids aren't supposed to die from being murdered by Ariados—before the Gengar appeared, cackling and jabbing its lollipop at the spider's eyes. "Vishnu!" it giggled. "Dirty little coward! Always picking on the weaker targets! Can't fight for yourself anymore, fat old attercop?" The Gengar made a Shadow Ball and launched it towards Vishnu, hitting it square-on but not appearing to do any great amount of damage.

For a moment, I saw the Ghost-type's grin flicker with uncertainty.

But the Ariados was sufficiently distracted from me, and levered its bloated body away with a snarl of malice. I hacked at the trap-thread, breaking it but not removing it, and had to settled for having some Spider Web attached to my sweatshirt.

Nihtgenga the Gengar used Night Shade and Sucker Punch next, then a Dark Pulse. Each attack was absorbed by Vishnu with insulting ease. She didn't even seem fazed by the moves that the Gengar was hitting her with. I got to my feet and didn't look back, running blindly away to the next cocoon, my hands shaking so badly that I nearly dropped the pocketknife a dozen times over, my eyes streaming tears that might have been from smoke and might have been from fear.

I had nearly died.

I had come within a hair's breadth of losing my life to an Ariados.

For the first time, I realized just how much peril I was putting myself in by helping the Gengar and its friends. I wasn't fighting, but I could die just as easily as the Meganium had, and it would only be thanks to sheer luck if I survived. A single Spinarak could take me down.

My hands were still shaking badly when I slit open the next cocoon, letting its burden tumble out to the ground and then moving on, hands going through the familiar motions but the eyes not really seeing what I was doing. I didn't even notice the Buizel that pitched forward out of a cocoon, my hands catching it automatically to lower it to the ground before I noticed the cast on one of the tails.

My heartbeat stuttered again, like a nervous schoolchild at her first poetry recital.

"Ozzy?" I asked, voice hoarse from inhaling smoke, a cough following the words.

One eye opened, and a lip lifted in a familiar snarl of menace. The Buizel squirmed out of my grasp and stood upright beside me, hooking her claws into my pants leg for support, glaring fiercely at her surroundings as though daring anything and anyone to come close and test how weak they thought she was.

As I watched her, my hands ceased their trembling and went still.

* * *

In Eterna Forest, the only light to be had was firelight, and this time the Mothim and Dustox stayed away. There were now only a few Spinarak left, and these were being individually hunted down by the Gengar's teammates. I searched through the area that had had Spider Web applied throughout it, and found only opened cocoons. Apparently, we had gotten them all.

There was a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye. At first I thought it was the Chatot, or else a burned branch falling from a tree, but the outline was wrong and I turned my head to see just what it was.

A bloated red abdomen. Gleaming eyes. Four legs, the fifth and sixth moved to its back to look like antennae. Venom-dripping mandibles that click and move. A fiery backdrop behind it all.

Apparently the Gengar hadn't managed to get its revenge for its dead trainer: Vishnu had found me again.

I grabbed Ozzy up in my arms, ignoring the way she snarled at me for subjecting her to such indignity, and ran. I leaped over the trap-threads on the ground and ducked low beneath the webs in the trees, hearing the thudding of the spider's own legs on the ground behind me, running blindly. A branch loomed in front of me and I turned my head, but felt a twig draw a red ribbon across my face as it scraped my cheek.

I coughed smoke, stumbled, tripped over a root, fell. Heard something behind me, turned over, rolled to the side just quick enough for the first Poison Jab to stab ruthlessly into the ground beside my head. Vishnu clicked her mandibles in frustration, then snarled when Ozzy sprayed water in her face. The Water Gun was pathetically weak, but just enough to distract the Ariados.

For a few seconds, anyway.

"Hehehe... Hehehe... frightened of old Nihtgenga, are you, Vishie?" the Gengar asked, drifting slowly towards us. The Ghost-type was bleeding and panting, with venom liberally splattered all over it and its limbs trembling from exhaustion and pain. Its manic grin was still in place, however. "Don't like taking on pokémon who fight back?"

The Ariados turned away from me to open her mandibles wide and snarl at the Gengar. I slowly inched away from her, grabbing Ozzy's collar and dragging her along with me. Vishnu didn't appear to notice our retreat.

The Ghost-type used a Confuse Ray, the balls of light making Vishnu shake her head from side to side and look around her like she didn't know where she was. She snapped out of it soon, however, and spat a Spider Web that the Gengar barely managed to dodge.

"Nah-nah-nah-nah-boo-boo! Missed me! Missed me!" the Gengar sang, cackling breathlessly. It used a Shadow Punch that didn't do anything beyond making the Ariados twitch with annoyance, then attempted to caper out of reach. Vishnu clicked her mandibles together in anger and used Shadow Sneak, scuttling into the shadow of a tree and not coming out again. She reappeared right behind the Gengar and attacked the Ghost with Night Shade, making the Gengar howl.

There was a brief flash of white light as Nihtgenga used Destiny Bond, and then... nothing.

I waited, my eyes glued to the spot where the Ariados had attacked. Neither body moved from its prone position on the ground. I waited some more. Still nothing. An agonized cry rent the air as the Scyther pursued the last of the Spinarak and managed to catch one, and there was a hissing noise as the Azumarill used Aqua Tail to extinguish stray fires. Each sound was strangely faraway and distant, like they belonged in a different world.

I stood up slowly and wiped at my face with the back of my hand, eyes stinging. Ozzy leaned against me, exhausted and probably poisoned, her head drooping. I needed to be a responsible trainer and get my pokémon to a place of safety, despite my own exhaustion.

I coughed, cleared my throat, and saw the unmoving heap that the Gengar and Ariados were lying in, locked together in death. I felt like I should say something. But what? What should I say. Which words were best?

"Thank you," I rasped, because that was all I could think of. It didn't feel right. I walked slowly away, and saw the girl I had found earlier leaning against a tree, just barely managing to stay upright. As we walked past her I offered my hand, sticky with Spider Web, sweat, and soot. She took it, and fell in step beside us as we stumbled slowly to a quieter place in the Forest.

* * *

**Nihtgenga: an old Anglo-Saxon word for "goblin"**

**Attercop: an archaic word referring to either a) a spider or b) an unpleasant person**


	13. Make New Friends

**Hello, everyone. It certainly has been an awkwardly long while, hasn't it? Well, I'm back now that my grades are more acceptable to my parents and the school year is coming to a close. Hopefully you'll like the new chapter.**

**As usual, please alert me if you spot any technical errors.**

* * *

I don't remember much of the rest of the night. After Nihtgenga's final battle with Vishnu, the remainder of the night was nothing but a disjointed blur of images: dappled moonlight falling through the leaves above my head, a vague wondering at why I had never before noticed how such moonlight leeched the color from everything and turned the world monochrome until dawn, tripping over a tree root, finding the body of a Hoothoot who had managed to escape the Spinarak but not the poison that coursed through its veins, having the girl stumble against my side, Ozzy's ragged breathing as she forced herself to keep moving (and the Buizel never complained, with her panting being the only sign of the exhaustion that she felt) and noticing a large dark stain on the girl's shirt that might have been blood.

Eventually, I must have collapsed at the base of a tree and gone to sleep. It _must_ have happened, even though I don't remember it, because when I woke up again it was noon (to judge by the position of the sun) and there was a Buneary dozing on my chest. Ozzy was draped across my legs, and Cassandra was curled up beside me.

I closed my eyes again and pinched myself hard enough to wince, then opened my eyes again and looked around. The Buneary was still sleeping peacefully on top of me, Ozzy was cutting off the circulation of blood to my feet, and the girl who had paralyzed and robbed me a few days ago was sleeping right beside me.

Or rather, she _had_ been sleeping. Her green eyes were open now and looking at me. I couldn't read them and figure out what she was thinking.

"You," I said flatly, narrowing my eyes. No-one has ever praised me for my eloquence.

"Me," Cassandra replied. She looked different than what I remembered—thinner, for one thing, her clothes now ragged and torn and a just bit too large for her, her fine-boned face gaunt with despair and hopelessness as well as hunger, her pale blonde hair now a matted tangle with leaves and twigs and stray bits of Spider Web stuck in it. The material of her shirt had been soaked with blood, but most of it had dried to an ugly, red-brown stain. There was still a fresh patch right over where her stomach was, however, glistening wetly and obscenely in the noontime sunlight that streamed through the leaves to fall on us both.

The talking, though brief, had woken Ozzy up. The Buizel blinked open her bleary eyes, looked around, then stared at the thief for a long moment. Her black eyes glittered like chips of obsidian, and she peeled her lips back in a snarl to reveal needle-like teeth of brilliant ivory. She limped over to stand between Cassandra and me, then crouched down on the dew-wet undergrowth like a watchdog ready to attack an intruder.

"If she tries anything, kill her," I said, far too calmly. Ozzy twitched one of her tails in acknowledgment that she had heard me, but didn't shift her gaze away from the inert Cassandra. Finally, my Buizel was acting the part of an obedient pokémon and for once not faking it—then again, she might still be faking... an enemy as badly wounded as Cassandra was would want every advantage she could get, and it wouldn't do to let her know that Ozzy wasn't really "my" pokémon.

I didn't know that my thoughts could get so very cold. It was strange, to be thinking this way, ordering the death of another person and plotting out their reasoning and my own counter-measure against it. Like a macabre parody of chess. I knew that Ozzy would do it—the Buizel wasn't all empty boasts and bravado, she was genuinely dangerous—and I had seen what teeth and claws could do thanks to that flame-filled horror of a night.

But still... for a moment I wondered just who I had become, and felt fear trace its chilled and bony fingers up my spine. Bile climbed up my throat, tapping its slimy fingers against my tonsils as it tried to get out, and I swallowed hard several times. If Cassandra tried to rob me again, she would want food and water—things that I couldn't spare. If she tried to rob me again, she would pay the price.

It had to be done this way. I swallowed again and gritted my teeth, feeling my stomach slowly settle. Reality was a harsh mistress, and the path to becoming extraordinary was a hard one. Having a heart that bled sympathy and trust would get me killed.

Cassandra looked at me with mild and rather weary green eyes as the internal conflict went on within me, their depths haunted by the shadow of pain. "I wasn't planning on knifing you and taking your stuff, if that's what you're thinking," she said softly.

"Like I can trust anything you say," I grumbled, then sat up. The Buneary woke up as it slid down the front of my shirt and into my lap. It squeaked and looked around, and I noticed that someone had tied a green ribbon around its neck. Maybe its trainer had been among the victims of Vishnu and her children, and it had adopted the first living humans it had found.

I absentmindedly petted the pokémon's soft brown fur with one hand. It could stay with me if it wanted, but I wasn't going to feed it with the food that I needed for myself and Ozzy. Cassandra would get some food too, but only because I was going to take her to the nearest police station as soon as I got to Eterna City.

_If_ I got to Eterna City, of course.

"We should get moving," I said, setting the Buneary aside and standing up. I was still tired from last night's events, despite my long sleep. My joints creaked and popped like an old man's as I stretched. I looked down at Cassandra, who was still lying on the ground like a discarded doll. "You coming?" I asked her. I didn't feel like being nice.

"I didn't think you'd be taking me along," she remarked in that soft, tired voice.

"Yeah, well, you'll get a free ride in Officer Jenny's patrol car as soon as we reach the suburbs of Eterna City," I snapped, grabbing her hand and hauling her upright. For a moment it was a pointless struggle, considering the advantage that the at-least-fifteen-year-old had on me in height and weight, but then Cassandra's feet moved under her and she shakily stood upright. Beneath her tan, her face had gone grey, and her eyes were showing white all around as they stared off into someplace that only she could see. The place where her pain lived, probably.

The fresh stain on her shirt had gotten bigger, too. The patch of wet blood now covered her midriff, and since Cassandra was standing upright I could see that the hem of her pants was stained with the red fluid as well.

"Are you—" I began, but she cut me off.

"Do you have a first aid kit with bandages?" Cassandra asked in a small voice, tight with pain.

I got it out of my bag and handed it over. Her hands trembled badly as she opened it and pulled out gauze and bandages and a small bottle of aspirin. She then stopped and looked at me. "I have to take off my shirt now," she said in that same voice. I was coming to hate that voice. "Please give me some privacy."

I pursed my lips for a moment, caught in an agony of indecision. There were scissors in that bag. I don't know what she could do with them, but they were there. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and all that.

"Please," she said again. "Your Buizel can stay, but could you please just..."

I picked up the Buneary and cradled it in my arms as I turned my back and walked a little ways away to stand behind a tree, trying to wipe the image of Cassandra's bloodstained shirt out of my mind. She needed to get to a hospital. Sure, I neither liked nor trusted the thief and was willing to let Ozzy kill her if she tried to rob me again, but it was just _wrong_ to allow someone to die out of pure spite.

Holding the Buneary in the crook of one arm, I used one hand to dig my cell phone out of my pants pocket. I had kept it turned off to conserve battery life in case an emergency came up and I needed to call Amelia so that her Gallade could teleport me to a hospital again, but that (as it turned out) didn't matter. The screen was cracked deeply and the phone itself wouldn't turn on. On one of my many hard falls in Eterna Forest I must have broken it.

I hurled the broken device into the nearest bush with a curse that would have had my mother giving me her coldest disapproving look. She had always held that swearing was the argot of fools and those with single-digit IQ scores, and wouldn't tolerate it in her house.

I then sighed hard and went over to the bush, picking up the broken phone and slipping it back into my pants pocket. I had been taught not to litter.

"I'm done," Cassandra called a few minutes later, and I walked back to where I had fallen asleep beside her. Ozzy was still there, but she didn't look nearly so hostile now. Disgusted might have been a better word, and perhaps pitying. Cassandra's face still had a greyish undertone to it, and there were bandages and gauze stretched around her midsection. It bulked out her shirt and made her look chubby.

"Can you travel now?" I asked bluntly. I didn't really know how to address her or treat her. She was injured, and for that reason I wanted to help her. But she had also robbed me, and I knew I couldn't trust her. Her brother Xander I wouldn't have been so wary around—Xander had been stupid and I think I could outsmart him, but his sister was the clever one of that duo. It was hard, to take care of someone but at the same time not give them any sort of opportunity to hurt you.

In answer to my question, Cassandra nodded mutely. I ate an extremely frugal meal as we walked forward, giving Ozzy a bigger portion (she was the only thing standing between myself and wild pokémon, after all). Cassandra refused the food I offered, though she did drink from my canteen. The Buneary whined and made piteous noises when it saw that no food was coming its way, but Cassandra carried it and fussed over it so that it stopped.

The thief walked as though it was only willpower that kept her moving—that, and the pull of my hand on her wrist when she slowed down too much. When we bedded down that night, the Buneary eagerly went over to a bush and began eating the leaves off of it, deserting Cassandra for several hours. Good. If it could forage for itself then I didn't need to feed it (nor have the weight on my conscience that it was going hungry because I was unable to take care of myself and it at the same time).

Cassandra had a very small amount of food and some more water that evening. She was pale, and obviously exhausted. I insisted that she take the sleeping bag in the tent, and stayed outside with Ozzy for the night. The Buneary slept with the older girl in the tent.

The next day was a repeat of the last, except that that was the day that I ran out of food. I was digging through my bag and taking everything out, packing and re-packing in the vague hope that there might be a stray granola bar or something that I hadn't already consumed. Ozzy was licking the inside of a plastic bag for stray crumbs.

My Buizel was also looking at the Buneary we had picked up the way I had once looked at takeout pizza. Ozzy was a carnivore, and apparently she saw no reason to limit herself to fish.

"Don't even think about it," I whispered to her, hoping that the Buneary didn't hear us. "The rabbit's been traveling with us for two days and actually _belongs_ to someone. Maybe that someone is dead, but you never know for certain. If you want to eat, go catch something yourself."

Ozzy gave me a dirty look. We stopped traveling when there was still some daylight left, and the Buizel promptly deserted our little company as soon as I set my backpack on the ground. I watched her vanish into the undergrowth, then began setting up the tent.

"If you don't mind, I'd prefer to sleep outside of that thing," Cassandra remarked as she watched me.

I paused and looked at her. "Why?"

She shrugged. "Getting back up once I lie down is... unpleasant, and I don't sleep very much anyway."

"Are you turning into a vampire or something?"

"No. The pain keeps me awake."

I knew she wasn't lying. Pain was in the way she walked and carried herself, and it was there when she cradled the stray Buneary in her arms and whispered to it. Also, she ate the pills from that bottle of aspirin the way little kids eat candy. I was amazed she hadn't overdosed on them yet.

I shrugged uncomfortably and looked away. "Sorry about that," I said.

"It's the Spinarak's fault, not yours," Cassandra retorted in her usual mild voice.

"Yeah, well, um... I guess your brother is..."

"Alive." She spoke that one word with utter conviction.

I was glad that I wasn't looking at Cassandra in that moment. She would have seen my grimace of disappointment otherwise and maybe have taken things the wrong way.

"You're sure about that?" I asked.

"The last I saw of him, he was running away while his Cubone was beating a Spinarak to death."

I began packing up the tent. If Cassandra wasn't going to sleep inside of it then I certainly wasn't, on account of wanting to keep an eye on my prisoner/traveling companion so that she didn't do anything strange while I was sleeping.

"So... _you_ were captured by the Spinarak but your brother ran away," I began, thinking as my hands words. "So Xander _left you_ _behind_ and hightailed it off to wherever he was going without so much as looking back over his shoulder. That's really... noble of him. It really is." There was a bitter taste in my mouth as I spoke the words. Sure, I hadn't liked Xander even to begin with, but now I _hated_ him. Running away and leaving your sister to die a horrible death? I guess I hadn't realized what a scumbag that douche with the Eevee had been.

_And would you have done any different if it had been Miranda's life on the line?_ whispered a voice in my head. It was the cold voice, the one that had ordered Ozzy to kill Cassandra if she tried anything funny. Except it wasn't fair to describe the voice that way, because I wasn't schizophrenic and couldn't simply claim that an alternate personality had used my own vocal words to say those words. It had been me and only me, and the cold voice was a part of me. A new part, sure, but I would have only myself to blame if I listened to it and did something horrible.

I shuddered once, almost unconsciously, and when I glanced over at Cassandra again she was still looking at me. "Xander's my brother," she said, "I love him and want him to be safe. Things went wrong after he got his Eevee to evolve and we went to the Spinarak-part of the Forest by accident, but I'm still glad that he got away. Wouldn't you feel the same if your own sibling's life was on the line?" She looked at me with earnest green eyes, expecting agreement and familial loyalty from me.

_Not at all, actually_, I thought, but then I bit my tongue and said nothing of the sort. "What happened to your pokémon?" I asked, wanting to change the subject.

"The Ariados ate them alive," Cassandra said bluntly, in a flat dead voice that let me know exactly what she had been dreaming of every night since her capture. I winced in sympathy and finished with the tent, then handed over my canteen. The older girl didn't eat much, but she was always thirsty.

Ozzy chose this moment to come back to our makeshift camp and hurl the bodies of two plump Buneary into my lap. The Buneary with the ribbon around its neck, the one that had adopted us, screamed in horror and hurled itself into Cassandra's arms, cowering into the older girl's shirt and whimpering pathetically. My Buizel's lip had curled in an amused sneer, and her shoulders were shaking with suppressed laughter.

"Thank you," I said, in the voice of a housewife who has just had the family cat deposit a dead mouse on her shoe. "Precisely what do you want me to do with these, pray tell?" Pokémon blood was staining my already-filthy jeans.

Ozzy gave me a disgusted look, as though she was saying 'you should damn well know'.

I rubbed at my suddenly-tired eyes for a moment, sighing heavily. "Fine, okay," I said, "I get what you're driving at. But I don't know know how to... butcher... an animal corpse. Humans can't eat raw meat."

Ozzy gave me a long-suffering look and gestured at me until I handed over my knife. The stubby digits on her paws had difficulty grasping and keeping hold of the utensil, but the steel was more precise than her teeth could be. When she casually slit open the stomachs and began removing the offal I decided to take a walk.

Fifteen minutes later, I came back and found the two Buneary skinned and prepared and looking like something out of the meat section of the grocery store rather than what PPCP would throw a fit over. Cassandra had stripped two branches of bark and was making spits out of them, and Ozzy was gathering wood. The Buneary was hiding in my backpack, crying to itself and being traumatized.

I have never been the greatest of cooks, and Cassandra wasn't much more competent than I was. Also, roasted meat that has absolutely no seasoning whatsoever isn't the most appetizing food in the world. But if you've been no reduced rations for several days and have actually gotten used to hunger pangs and a hollow feeling in your gut, it tastes pretty good. A few hours later, as dusk fell on Eterna Forest, Ozzy and I were happily licking grease off of our fingers and feeling happy. I'd forgotten what it was like to have a full stomach.

Cassandra hadn't done more than nibble, and the Buneary had eventually forgiven us after the older girl had patiently spent a half hour explaining how some things were necessary for survival. There is probably nothing in this world that will love you as much and for less reason than a young pokémon.

I watched as Cassandra fastidiously wiped her greasy fingers on a beech leaf in an attempt to clean them, and Ozzy licked her chops contentedly. We buried the bones, offal, skin, and whatever else we didn't eat in a hole beneath a bush with the vague hope that scavengers wouldn't be attracted to our campsite, and even though it was early afternoon I felt more like sleeping than anything else. The Buizel apparently agreed with me, because after I'd fashioned the tent into a lean-to she was happy to crawl into the shade and curl up there. Cassandra sat down at the base of the tree, with the Buneary nibbling on greenery for a quarter hour before deciding to take a nap in the older girl's lap.

I sat down beside the older trainer, the thief, the injured person that I couldn't trust but had to care for. "I think you should eat more," I said awkwardly, stuck in that rift between compassion and distrust. "I mean... _I_ eat more than you, and I've been rationing myself pretty strictly..."

Cassandra shook her head. "Trust me," she said, "If you had my condition then you wouldn't want to eat anything. It's only going to get worse."

"What's going to get worse?"

"How I'm feeling. Do you think we're going to get out of the Forest soon?"

I bit my lip for a moment as I thought. Honest truth was, I had no idea. My compass was still working and I knew the approximate direction to go in, but I had only the foggiest notion of just when we were going to get out of here. There are horror stories about Eterna Forest and how sometimes trainers get lost in here and never come out for months. Or else not at all.

"Sometime soon?" I suggested weakly, trying to smile, but Cassandra just shook her head at me like she could see through me as easily as she would look out a window.

"If you meet Xander again sometime, tell him that I love him, okay?" she asked me. "I don't want him to feel guilty about what happened. And please give him this." She took off her necklace and made to hand it to me. I refused to take it and shoved the necklace back at her, more roughly than was polite.

"Quit that!" I snapped at her, "You're not going to die! We're going to get out of this stinking forest real soon, and then we're gonna get you to a hospital ASAP. You'll be fine. Promise."

But Cassandra just shook her head at me. "Don't make a promise you can't keep," she warned me.

I resisted the urge to slap her, gritting my teeth for a moment before checking myself. Maybe Ozzy's methods of dealing with the people around her were starting to rub off on me. "You'll be fine," I grumbled, crossing my arms over my chest.

"How can you possibly be so sure—_hurk_!" Cassandra threw herself forward onto her hands and knees, and managed to make it to the small latrine I had dug before throwing up. For the sake of precise recording, I'll say that her vomit was pathetically watery, and not much of it was even _produced_. She really did need to eat more, though perhaps the roasted Buneary had been too rich for her. If I'd had dry biscuits on hand I would have made her eat one or two of those.

And while all that went on, the Buneary tumbled out of Cassandra's lap with a surprised squeal, and I remained sitting at the base of the tree. I felt horrible—I'd had the stomach flu once before, and vomiting wasn't fun. Vomiting while someone was _watching_ was even worse. The Buneary ran off into the woods, and Ozzy snarled at us all for daring to disturb her sleep. A few minutes later the Buneary trotted back, clutching an armful of spearmint stalks. Cassandra chuckled weakly when she saw the plants, and took them with a murmured word of gratitude.

"What are those for?" I asked, looking at the herbs.

"Mint is supposed to be good for stomach trouble," Cassandra said. "Also, it smells nice." She took the small camping kit that I had packed in my backpack. There wasn't much inside it—a pot, a pan, flatware for one person, and a cup—but she filled the pot up with water from my canteen. I figured out what she was going after and gathered more deadwood from the surrounding area, then got the fire going after fourteen tries with the matches and kindling (read: shredded twigs).

Cassandra made mint tea for herself and I had peach, and the Buneary was petted and praised for getting the mint leaves. Ozzy scowled at the rabbit the whole time, and stole my tea. We went to sleep early that night.

The next day, however, we went hungry except for some berries and bitter-tasting roots that the Buneary had found. Ozzy disappeared around midday and came back at dusk, snarling at everyone and everything. She bullied the Buneary until Cassandra scolded her, then hung around me and sulked. Apparently the two kills she'd made the day before had been more because of luck than anything else. Buizel weren't exactly the most ideal hunters in a forest.

Cassandra wasn't doing well. The vomiting got worse and she developed a fever, alternating between sweating and shivering. The aspirin pills ran out, and she complained of horrible stomach pain. I went through the first aid kit and found some antibiotic tablets. Most trainer kits stocked them, mostly because there was a high rate of injury and you couldn't always get to a hospital within a couple of days. There weren't very many of them. Cassandra threw up two of the tablets but managed to keep four down, and they seemed to do a little bit of good. But we ran out far too quickly, and there was no sign that we were approaching the end of Eterna Forest.

"You're not going to die," I kept telling her. As her condition (whatever it truly was) worsened, I'd overcome my distrust of her. She was so pathetically weak that I don't think she could have hurt me, even if she'd tried. She didn't often need to "use the bushes" and ate less and less, but drank a lot of water. The Buneary hovered over her, refusing to leave Cassandra's side. I pitied the pokémon, really. It had probably already lost one trainer, and the new trainer that it had adopted was really sick.

For the first time in a long time, I got down on my knees and prayed.

Of course, praying wasn't the only thing I did. Ozzy snarled and growled at me and nearly stuck the knife in my thigh (_mostly_ on accident) but she did persuade me to learn how to butcher an animal. I won't record it here, seeing as the knowing is mostly in your hands and the insides of whatever creature is laid out before you, but it's bloody work and not very enjoyable.

When Ozzy managed to make a kill (rarely) we gorged ourselves, and ate everything there was to eat. I would have eaten more plants, too, but those took time to find and required stopping our traveling early. Once, I nearly put a hemlock root into my mouth. The Buneary threw a fit and slapped me with its ears, and I discovered that the little rabbit pokémon knew the move Pound very well.

Eventually, of course, we went to sleep one night. It was peaceful, with the woods-sounds surrounding us. I'd gotten used to the calls of the Hoothoot and the flap of Mothim-wings, and the hardness of the ground didn't bother me quite so much as it once had. It was... almost normal. A routine that I had somehow found the rhythm of and could move to. When I was full and had food inside me I didn't really mind, but on the often-hungry nights I found myself thinking more and more of how much I hated Eterna Forest. Then again, hunger makes me bitter.

I was just drifting back to sleep when I heard the cackling laughter in a nearby bush: high and shrieking and loud, utterly insane, with a vague maliciousness. "No! Go _away_!" I screamed, sitting bolt upright. Ozzy sprayed the bush with the most powerful Water Gun I had yet to see her use, and the laughter went quiet for a few moments... but it quickly came back again, in a different location, and plagued us all night long.

I groaned and put my head in my hands: the Creeper had found us again.

* * *

**PPCP: People Preventing Cruelty to Pokémon. Sort of like the American PETA, but... yanno... pokémon-style.**

**hemlock: an extremely poisonous plant. Water-hemlock is reckoned to be one of the most poisonous plants in North America.**

_**Oh, yes, and one more thing. Do any of my readers think I handled the Cassandra thing well (or badly)? It's... difficult... to create this sort of interaction between characters, and I didn't want to understate or overdo anything. Any feedback on this would be appreciated.**_


	14. Knights All in Blue

**Note: in this story, female police officers wear long pants rather than skirts. It's just far too impractical to chase someone down wearing a skirt, and they don't offer as much protection as a pair of pants do. So, yeah, my reasoning. I know it contrasts the anime, which is why you get this heads-up.**

**Also, title of this chapter is stolen from a book by Joseph Wambaugh - _The Blue Knight_. If you're interested in a book that realistically portrays police officers and what they go through, I'd recommend reading it.**

**And if you couldn't tell, a good bit of this chapter deals with law enforcement officers.**

* * *

The next morning, Cassandra decided that she couldn't travel anymore. It hurt too much for her to want to get up, and attempting to pull her upright resulted in a choked-off scream that freaked me out so much that I dropped her back down to where she had been sitting.

"You should just go," Cassandra said, picking a twig out of her hair with a trembling hand and looking grey underneath her tan. She always looked unwell, but today was probably the worst I had seen her.

I snorted. "No. We'll probably make it out of Eterna Forest in another two days, tops. It would _suck_ if you weren't there to get to that hospital, now would it?" When had I become such a good liar, and how? We weren't going in circles, that much I was certain of, but I really did have no idea when Eterna Forest was supposed to end.

"You can call the Ranger Station and send them to pick me up," Cassandra murmured. "You'll get there faster if I'm not slowing you down."

"I'm taking you with me," I replied. We argued until Cassandra was too exhausted to keep her eyes open (it only took about half an hour, unfortunately) let alone continue the debate, and then I spent the rest of the morning trying to build a travois from two long branches, some rope, and a sweater. I didn't succeed. Cassandra couldn't be moved without aid, and I loitered in the small clearing we had found ourselves in for the rest of the day.

Chaperoned by Ozzy, the Buneary went looking for plants for us to eat. They both returned around dusk, the Buneary with another armful of wild strawberries and the Buizel with a dead Murkrow. There were three eggs tucked into the crook of the sea-weasel's arm: apparently she had found the Murkrow's nest, as well as the Murkrow itself.

Salad, omelets, and roast meat. Yum.

I mixed some of the juice from the wild strawberries with water, and fed that to Cassandra. The Buneary made faces at the Buizel, as Ozzy tore into the roast fowl in an attempt to look deliberately barbaric. She was going to get grease all over her fur _again_.

_"__Trainer..._" Ozzy growled as she watched the sun sinking into the west. And that was another new development. Most trainers could understand their pokémon pretty well, and once you knew your pokémon well enough then you could start to understand what they were actually _saying_. It was about the way they stood, the way they moved, turned, looked at you, facial expressions and paw movements, eyes, the twitch of an ear. Actual vocalization was just filling in the gaps. I wasn't too good yet, but I could manage a (very) simple conversation with the Buizel.

"We'll move on tomorrow if Cassandra still isn't well enough to travel," I said, and Ozzy reluctantly jerked her head up and down in an imitation of a human nod. She was probably going to take out her anger on some trees as soon as my back was turned, but... Whatever. So long as she didn't rip my face open while I was asleep or bully the Buneary too much.

Yeah, the Buneary. Our one and only defense against the Creeper. Apparently, the Creeper was a Ghost-type, and the Buneary was a Normal-type. Which meant that the Buneary was immune to everything that our nighttime tormenter tried to do, and could defend us when Ozzy and I were running around like Torchics with our heads cut off thanks to the Creeper's Confuse Ray.

Ozzy had _not_ been happy when she'd found that out. That Buizel can be proud beyond belief—not vain, not caring about her appearance, but just watch her strut when you praise her power—but Arceus help you if you try and usurp her position as the chief battler on the team. The Buneary was almost pathetically eager to please and had been shining like a star when it figured out a new way to help Cassandra and I, but Ozzy had been sulking and snarling all that day.

I watched another encounter go down. Ozzy stole the Buneary's food, then snarled at the smaller pokémon when it tried to protest. Then, _I _had to step in and make the Buizel give the strawberries back... it was horrible. Trying to shame or threaten Ozzy into stopping her behavior resulted in scratches all over my arms and some bites on my fingers. Not serious ones, but they hurt. It was like taking care of an overly aggressive toddler who was constantly harassing its younger sibling. Sometimes I wanted to pull my hair out in frustration.

Just as the Buizel was reaching out with her claws _again_, I hugged her compulsively to me and got a scratch on the shoulder for my trouble. The Buneary squealed and went over to hide behind Cassandra, who feebly raised a hand to pet the Normal-type's long ears and soothe it.

Yeah, I think that the Buneary was more Cassandra's pokémon than mine.

The last few days, it seemed like Cassandra was mostly hanging on just because the Buneary would cry inconsolably whenever the older girl seemed about to give up on living. But right now, even if the Buneary cried an ocean for Cassandra, I don't think the older girl was going to travel right now. Maybe a day of rest was what she needed, and she could go a little further tomorrow.

Maybe.

That night, I went to sleep with Ozzy using my leg as a pillow. The Buneary would keep watch (mostly over Cassandra) and would foil all of the Creeper's Ghost-type attacks. The next day, it would probably hitch a ride in my backpack (which was considerably lighter now that there wasn't any food in it) and nap the afternoon away so that it would be alert and ready when dusk fell again.

The Creeper's nighttime attacks weren't nearly as bad now that we had the Buneary with us. The Ghost-type was frustrated by the Normal-type that continued to ruin its every plan, and it mostly focused its efforts on the Buneary. I had learned to sleep through strange noises, which probably wasn't a good thing in the long run but allowed me to get a decent night's rest when the Creeper was hanging around. When the sun rose again in the morning, I was feeling reasonably well rested and fit enough to continue the trek towards the end of Eterna Forest.

There was only one problem: Cassandra had died during the night.

The corpse was propped up against the trunk of a laurel tree, eyes open, lips slightly parted, skin cold and unresponsive. I spent five minutes desperately checking for a pulse that wasn't there as the Buneary wrapped its arms around my leg and cried into the stinking denim of my jeans. I gave up hope, however, when I watched the first of the flies land on Cassandra's naked eyeball and skitter across her pupil.

I would have liked to say that I buried her in secret, that I found a secret cavern beneath the roots of the oldest oak in Eterna Forest and hid her body there on a stone slab beneath a spreading dome of roots. That I covered her body in the tiny white flowers that grew in Eterna Forest and sealed away the entrance to the earth chamber and carved her name in six different languages upon the door. But I didn't do any of that. I didn't know about any secret chambers, and the flowers would have taken all day to find anyway.

I closed her eyes and took her necklace like she would have wanted me to, and mumbled out a prayer that I had learned a long time ago and only half remembered. Each word sounded awkward and inadequate and apologetic, as though each syllable was apologizing for its very existence as it lingered in the air and died. Eterna Forest made no sound as I said my farewells, but then it very rarely made any sound at all.

We moved on. Though I hate to say it, now that we weren't dragging Cassandra along with us we made better time. The Buneary cried itself to sleep in my arms. I tried to comfort it, but I wasn't very good at that. I had never been good with children or baby pokémon. I didn't know when to keep silent and hold them and I didn't know when to sing or when to reassure them. Ozzy was the same way, except she didn't bother with even trying to be nice.

Three days later we made it to the outskirts of Eterna City, just a little bit after nightfall.

What was I to say? I nearly burst into happy tears when I saw the hard white gleam of the streetlights through the trees. It was neither sunlight nor moonlight but _artificial_, _electrical_ _light_. We hitched a ride in the back of a man's pickup truck to go to the Pokémon Center. The bed of the truck was coated with straw and it vibrated slightly when I sat on it, moving in response to the engine that propelled the entire vehicle.

The truck stank of gasoline and cigarettes and I was _happy_ to smell that, happy to smell smog and exhaust and see electrical light and greasy fast food joints along the side of the road with neon glowing in their windows. No more forest. No more oppressive darkness and trees crowding all around. No more Buneary meat that had been roasted over an open fire. Fresh water. Real beds and clean clothes and decent medical treatment. And oh, Arceus, a _shower_. I had no idea I could be reduced to happy tears by the thought of taking a _shower_. With hot water and soap, too. Oh, Arceus...

And Cassandra, of course. That thought cut into my daydreams and sobered me up very quickly. I would have to get Nurse Joy to phone the Ranger Station and find a Pokémon Ranger to retrieve Cassandra's body for burial. As I watched the nighttime streets of Eterna City pass by me, with Ozzy leaning out over the side of the truck so that she could better feel the wind in her fur (I swear, if she had been a Growlithe she would have been panting and wagging her tail) and the Buneary dozing in my lap, I was a little stunned.

Trainers who came home after they won their badges never talked about the hardships. Well, they did, but it was mostly about aching muscles and running low on food and how many battles they lost. Nobody ever talked about watching their traveling companion slowly sicken and die before their very eyes. Maybe it was some sort of unwritten rule—the worst things that happen to you as a trainer are never discussed with a non-trainer. Because non-trainers, people who had never experienced that sort of thing, would also never understand.

When we got there, the Pokémon Center was (of course) still open. It was always open, but I was happy nonetheless. I had made it through the Forest intact and was ready to win the Forest Badge from Gardenia.

I just had to get some stuff done, first. Like catching that Bug-type to battle her with.

The Nurse Joy of Eterna City must have been used to bedraggled trainers coming in looking as though they're about to drop dead of starvation at any moment, with leaves and twigs in their greasy matted hair, wearing bloodstained and filthy clothes, and with injured pokémon walking beside them. She took the Buizel and the Buneary from me without so much as batting an eyelash, though her Chansey did _tsk_ at me for tracking mud onto the Center's clean tile floors.

And as for me, I noticed some people subtly shifting away from me and suddenly remembered that I hadn't bathed for over two weeks. The way people were discreetly wrinkling their noses and edging away was beyond mortifying, and I snatched the room key out of the Joy's hand and possibly broke the sound barrier as I fled up the stairs to room 19 where I had been quartered.

The room in Eterna City's Pokémon Center was much the same as Jubilife City's, with bunk beds and only the basic necessities. But hell, there was an actual mattress for me to sleep on tonight, so I don't think I would have really cared if the Joy had put me in a barn with only the Miltank for company_._ There was one other girl here, already asleep with her team using her as either a) their snuggly toy or b) a pre-warmed blanket. I crept into the bathroom and spent a half hour in the shower, washing off the dirt and filth and scrubbing myself completely and utterly clean so that my skin was pink and tingling all over.

When I looked in the bathroom mirror, I was different from what I remembered myself as.

The girl who'd graduated from the fourth grade in the beginning of June didn't look like me. That girl had worn her long, coarse black hair in a ponytail and kept her face shaded with the bill of a baseball cap. She'd worn clean clothes and had been pretty fit. Now, I looked different. My hair was as short as a boy's and my face was leaner. My cheekbones stood out like knifeblades and my eyes were red-rimmed and sunken into my face. I had never been chubby, _ever_, but now there was not a single spare ounce of flesh to be had on my body thanks to near-starvation and constant exercise. There was an uneven tan covering my arms and face, and my clothes were filthy and ragged. Grey eyes stared back at me from the mirror. At least _those_ hadn't changed.

Well, actually, they had. Just a little bit. I couldn't remember my eyes having that much depth in them before, that much experience. Maybe I was flattering myself, but my eyes seemed older. Like every other kid in the world, I was in a hurry to grow up. I pressed myself as close as I could to the mirror and examined the scabbed-over scratches on my face and arms and hands. Then I breathed on the mirror, fogging it over so that I couldn't see my face anymore, and combed my hair. I put on wrinkled but clean clothes and brushed my teeth, then left the room.

Ozzy and the Buneary were waiting for me on Nurse Joy's counter. Ozzy had new stitches and bangages and the Buneary had some candy, which it was eating happily. Judging from the Buizel's sour expression, it was clear that Ozzy thought she hadn't gotten the better part of the deal. I gave her a helpless shrug as the Nurse used scissors to cut out the stitches from my finger. The stump had healed and was just fine now. It didn't even hurt, mostly. The other burned fingers on that hand would be scarred, but they would have full mobility and function once they healed.

"Is that your Buneary?" Nurse Joy asked me as she logged onto the computer at her desk.

"Not really, no," I said, feeling my stomach sink down below my intestine. This was just like the way it had been with Ozzy when I'd first gotten the name of her trainer. I went on: "It kinda found me in Eterna Forest and adopted me. Do you know its real trainer?"

"Him," Nurse Joy corrected absently, not even looking at me. She scrolled through a list of something on her computer and frowned. "I have a record of this Buneary belonging to a breeder in Solaceon Town and then being sold to a family who moved here recently. The daughter of the family went missing on her tenth birthday when she was told she couldn't become a coordinator."

_And then the kid went into the Forest and found Vishnu waiting for her..._ I felt like throwing up.

"I think I know what happened to the... the daughter of the family," I said hesitantly. "But its kind of a long story and I want to tell you in private, without other people making comments or anything."

Nurse Joy took one look at my face and beckoned me into her office. It was a small room with a desk, a computer, three chairs, and a bookshelf filled with medical texts. Her diploma from nursing school had been framed and was hanging on the wall. The Chansey sat down on a stool beside the Nurse's desk and brought out a notepad and a pen, prepared to take dictation. I sat down in one of the chairs and felt Ozzy take up a position beside me on the floor. The Buneary crawled into my lap and hid its—_his_—face in my shirt.

Slowly, haltingly, I told Nurse Joy about Nihtgenga and Vishnu and the Spinarak in Eterna Forest, and what happened there. I told her about Cassandra too. When my throat dried out, an aide brought me a glass of water to drink. The Buneary fell asleep on my lap as I stroked his soft brown fur. Ozzy idly tied knots in my shoelaces from boredom. Nurse Joy went pale several times, and by the end of it she was phoning both the police and the nearest Ranger Station.

And me, I was more than ready to get back to that mattress in room 19. I had been sleeping on the ground for far too long, and I wanted to lie on something _soft_ for once when I rested my aching muscles and weary bones. But, alas, it was not to be. No more than five minutes after Nurse Joy had finished her call to the police station, an Officer Jenny and one of her squadmates drove to the Pokémon Station in a police car and walked into Nurse Joy's office.

Here's something very interesting that I'm willing to bet you didn't know: when a policewoman gives you a critical look and frowns at you, you immediately feel guilty. Even if you haven't done anything wrong, you feel guilty. I have no idea why, but I've asked around and apparently that's the way it is with most people.

When Officer Jenny glanced my way I sunk down in my seat, feeling like a little kid who's just been caught with a hand in the cookie jar. Ozzy crouched under the chair and bared her teeth at the two officers, snarling fitfully at them from behind my legs. The Buneary whimpered loudly and I automatically put my arms around him, cuddling the poor thing protectively.

The male officer glanced my way. He had the same green-blue hair as the Officer Jenny herself and the same brown eyes, and was about the same height. "Please recall your pokémon, Miss," he said, looking warily at the feral-looking Buizel that was threatening him from under my chair. I hoped he couldn't understand what Ozzy was snarling—all I caught was snippets, but it was enough to get the general idea of visceral carnage.

"Miss? Could you please recall your pokémon?" he asked me again when I didn't do anything.

I lightly kicked Ozzy to get her attention, then heard a stifled yelp. I must have hit one of her injuries. Any and all remorse that I felt, however, was wiped out by the feel of claws swiping across my calf and drawing ribbons of blood. I got the Buneary out of the way and bent over so I could peer under the chair at Ozzy. "Stop that snarling!" I hissed at her. "They're not going to hurt us."

_"__But Trainer, we can't trust them. They're—"_ I didn't catch the word that came after that. What followed was a long session of charades and gesturing as the adults (the two police officers and the Joy) discussed what to do about the whole situation regarding the bodies in the Forest. As for me, I was trying to figure out what Ozzy was attempting to tell me. Sometimes I think that partially understanding a language is even worse than having no understanding of it at all.

Fifteen minutes passed.

What I learned was this: Ozzy couldn't really tell the difference between different humans, the same way that most humans couldn't really tell the difference between separate individuals of the same species of pokémon. She knew me and her real trainer, but only because she'd traveled with each of us for over half a month and had memorized our scents. The way that the two police officers wore the same uniform and seemed _exactly the same_ had freaked her out, and she'd responded the way she usually reacted to strange new things that unsettled (read: frightened) her—by being hostile and ready to fight if they came too close.

Another thing I learned was this: I was going to be spending the night at the police station, since I was a material witness to both Cassandra's death and the extermination of the Spinarak. I was also going to have to temporarily put my pokémon into police custody, which was extremely awkward because I had to explain that neither Ozzy nor the Buneary was really "my" pokémon, and that I didn't have the poké balls to contain them. Also, when it was explained to her that she was going to have to leave me behind and go with the two officers, Ozzy had another freak-out. She clung determinedly to my leg and nearly bit Officer Jenny. When I tried to pry her off by myself, she sunk her claws through my jeans and into my leg.

When _that_ happened, I used a word that my mother hadn't taught me. All of the adults in the room gave me disapproving looks, the Buneary started to cry again, and as Ozzy continued to snarl at everyone and cling to my leg I think Officer Jenny looked ready to bang her head against the wall.

Eventually, it was decided that I needed to formally "capture" each pokémon into a poké ball so that they could be contained safely. The Center had a few spare balls on hand, which was useful, and the Buneary was captured quickly and without trouble. It was actually a relief to have his trembling, weeping self out of my arms for awhile.

But Ozzy was a different story, of course.

The Buizel refused to be captured, and would use her hardened cast to strike the poké balls and send them rebounding back to whoever had thrown them. She got me in the nose several times. From her snarled words (what I could understand of them) the police officers frightened her. Getting Ozzy to admit that she was scared of anything was worse than pulling teeth, but she really was frightened by Officer Jenny and her partner. And when Ozzy became frightened of anything, she responded by fighting back and trying her hardest to utterly destroy whatever had scared her.

So the dilemma boiled down to this question: how do you battle a pokémon in a small, cramped space without destroying either the environment or the person that the pokémon was attached to? Thanks to the type advantage, the Buizel actually _defeated_ Officer Jenny's Growlithe (she also sprayed the books on Nurse Joy's shelf with water, which put Chansey into a panic and caused a complete halt to all capture operations as the books and every other small and breakable thing was taken out of Nurse Joy's office and put into the hallway). The male officer's Poochyena (he'd gotten it from a cousin in Hoenn) was another failure—the Poochyena's best moves were physical by nature, which seemed perfectly acceptable up until the point where Ozzy dodged out of the way of a Bite attack and I ended up accidentally being on the receiving end of the Dark-type's jaws.

Naturally, I screamed rather loudly, and the pokémon immediately released me with an apologetic whine and contritely tucked its tail between its legs. This was the perfect opportunity for Ozzy to dart forward and shred one of the Poochyena's ears before it could get away or retaliate. I could feel the blood trickling down my leg and staining my sock - it wasn't a very severe bite and the Poochyena's teeth hadn't gone far, but it still hurt like something I can't describe.

Also naturally, Ozzy honestly didn't seem to give a damn about my well-being. She wasn't very sorry that it was her stubbornness that was causing me to bleed over the carpet in Nurse Joy's office. This time, the two officers didn't so much as flinch when I swore again and struck the Buizel with my fists. We were all getting fed up with Ozzy and didn't really feel like being nice. I got a nip on the sensitive webbing between my thumb and forefinger for the trouble, which probably meant that Ozzy was being gentle with me.

Finally, Officer Jenny used her Beautifly's Mega Drain to simply sap at Ozzy's strength until the Buizel fainted. She also ordered a Stun Spore to aid with the capture attempt, which meant that I was paralyzed as well, but at least there were spicy Cheri berries for _me _to eat afterwards.

Ozzy was finally captured, my leg was bandaged, and I got a ride in Officer Jenny's patrol car on the drive back to the police station for the night. Remembering what I had once said to Cassandra about her getting a ride in such a car made me snort at the irony of the situation.

"That was a nice 'mon you had," the male officer said over his shoulder in the car. He was riding shotgun with Officer Jenny driving, and I was sitting in the back seat.

"Nice?" I asked. "I, um, well I wouldn't call her nice, sir..." I trailed off into mumbling and stared down at my lap, picking at a hangnail on one finger.

"I'd go with vicious and aggressive, myself," the Officer Jenny said dryly. "I'd advise getting a pokémon with a more even temperament, rather than letting yourself be bitten and scratched constantly. That Buneary seemed much more suited to a beginning trainer."

I thought of the way the Buneary cried easily and often and frequently whined when he couldn't be carried. Then I thought of Ozzy, who was neither nice nor friendly but who never complained and was willing to nearly kill herself to get back to her trainer. I knew which one I could depend on.

"I like my pokémon just fine, ma'am," I said.

"Ooh, Janet, look. You've made her mad," the male officer teased. I blushed hard in shame (I hate being made fun of) and stared down at my lap. Then I looked up sharply.

"Why'd you call her Janet, sir?"

"Because that's her name...?"

Officer Jenny/Janet sighed loudly from the driver's seat of the vehicle. "Look, Miss," she said, "Not all Jennys are named Jenny. We just all _answer_ to the name Jenny if you feel like calling us that, and names starting with J run in our families. That's Johnny sitting beside me. Please get over it."

"Okay," I said meekly.

"Dyke," Officer Johnny muttered scathingly. Maybe he thought that I couldn't hear him. Officer Janet punched him hard on the arm and they both listened to the radio as it listed situations that needed officers, calling out numbers and codes in a crackly static voice.

"Can I ask a question?" I asked softly from the back after a little time had passed.

"Go ahead," the male officer replied.

"Why do I have to stay at the station? I mean, I'm pretty sure I haven't done anything wrong..."

"No, you haven't," Officer Janet answered as I trailed off. "It's just that when we have a material witness like yourself—a material witness being someone who has seen otherwise-unverified evidence and is the only reason the police knows about said evidence—it's procedure to keep them at the station until the evidence has been verified and collected. You're not in trouble for anything."

"Oh. Well, um, how long do you think I'll be staying?"

"Probably until nine o'clock or so in the morning of next day," Officer Johnny replied, with a shrug to show that he wasn't entirely certain. "We'll find a place for you to sleep, and you get breakfast thrown in too."

"Nice. Thank you."

"Don't thank me until you've tasted the burnt sausage and dry eggs in the canteen," Officer Johnny replied darkly.

"Stop that," Janet grumbled. "She's a trainer, and most trainers don't care how the food is so long as it's hot and they're not paying. And besides, the coffee's pretty good."

"She's too young for coffee."

"I am not!"

"Yes you are."

"No I'm not."

"Well, I say you are, and I'm thirteen or so years older than you, so my word is law."

"Just shut up, Johnny. She can have decaf if she wants to drink coffee."

"Fine, fine, whatever..."

The rest of the conversations that we had in the patrol car on the way to the police station went pretty much like that. Officer Johnny was friendlier and more outgoing, maybe because he felt that I needed to be cheered up after witnessing the massacre of the Spinarak and seeing all of those dead bodies. I _did_ need to be cheered up, but that would happen on its own with time.

At the police station I was stashed in a small office and given a cot to sleep in—it wasn't nearly as soft as a mattress, but it was easy to pretend it was once I had spread my sleeping bag over it and snuggled down over the night. Another policewoman (not Officer Janet) was keeping watch over me. Why, I never knew. She was an older woman who had spent nearly twenty years on the force, with two grown children of her own. The boy was a coordinator, and the girl was a trainer. She told me about them in soft, soothing voice as I slowly drifted off.

I woke up around two o'clock in the morning after a nightmare about Vishnu. I'd been back in Eterna Forest and she'd been chasing me again, but this time Nihtgenga the Gengar hadn't been there to save my skin. When I looked around, the small and cluttered office in the police station was a strange landscape of silhouettes and shadows illuminated by the bars of moonlight that had managed to make it into the room through the blinds covering the windows.

"Officer Jay?" I called softly into the darkness. "Are you still here?"

"Nah. Her shift ended 'bout an hour ago. I think you're old enough to spend the night by yourself, but does anybody listen to me here? Nope." The figure of a tall woman shifted slightly so that I could notice her. She was leaning against a filing cabinet, her uniform cap off and the top buttons of her shirt undone. It was a hot night, and this place didn't have air conditioning.

"Why can't I be left alone?"

"It's just a procedure that we have to follow in this sort of situation. And no, before you ask, you can't have your pokémon with you while you're here. You'll get them back before you leave, so don't worry." The policewoman sounded bored, like she had dealt with a lot of trainers worried about their pokémon before.

"Okay."

"If you throw a tantrum about it, I'll—but hey, you didn't. Nice of you."

"I try."

"Hehe, yeah, you trainers are little angels whenever a cop in uniform shows up, ain't you? Well, I guess you've got reason to be, once the families of the murdered people find out about their dead relations."

Ice trickled down my spine, to pool in the hollow of my gut. "Why?" I asked. "What's going to happen then?"

"Well, legally there's nothing anyone can do against you. I mean, it wasn't _your_ Ariados that did the deed, and no-one could even suspect a little shrimp like you with no gym badges of ever owning it. But people always need someone to blame besides themselves. It makes them feel better about things, that it wasn't their own fault. And grieving parents aren't the most sensible of people. There'll be a lot of people who'll want to talk to you in the morning."

I made a strangled choking noise that might have been a protest.

"Though there might be a small chance of you being sued, if the parents of that Cassandra kid think you didn't try hard enough to help their daughter," the policewoman mused.

"But I did try!" I said. "I did everything I could. I wrote it all down in my journal if they want to read it."

The policewoman's teeth flashed white in the moonlight as she grinned. "Sorry, kid, but anyone could assume that you've forged that," she pointed out, taking the journal that I had left lying on top of my backpack and turning on a light to idly flip through it. She got to the page where I had written everything that had seemed wrong with Cassandra and read through that part more carefully.

"This stuff makes dull reading," she commented, "But at least it's accurate. If it's any help to you, I think your friend had peritonitis."

"...That sounds like something to do with teeth."

"It's not." The policewoman scratched her head for a moment. "Peritonitis is when the walls of your stomach or intestines or whatever gets a hole and starts leaking bacteria and... things... out all over the rest of you. There's infection and organ failure and basically your digestive system sort of dies and starts rotting while the rest of you keeps on living for awhile. Gangrene is often involved. Very icky, very painful. "

"That's... disgusting. How'd you know about it?"

"Saw it with a homeless guy who'd gotten shot. Also, I was planning to major in medicine for awhile before I ended up switching my major to beer and my minor to partying."

"Um..."

"Yeah. Flunked my final exams and ran away to join the police academy. You should get some sleep, kid. Tomorrow's going to be a big day for you."

"Why?"

"Well, that's when the media-people get to tell everyone in Sinnoh about the brave little girl who helped take down a bunch of Spinarak and an Ariados, right?"

* * *

**Note: peritonitis is a real condition, and I wasn't making up anything about it. Seriously, go look it up on the web if you're doubting me and have a strong stomach.**

**Second Note: I figure that since Cassandra is dead, then there's no more spoilers about her. There's a woman named Cassandra who features in Homer's _Iliad_. There are a lot of different versions of the story, but the one I'm most familiar with is where Cassandra (a princess of Troy) is in Apollo's temple and the god attempts to seduce her. When his attempts fail, Apollo curses Cassandra with foresight so that she can see the future. However, she can only ever see the tragedies that await her, and if she tries to tell anyone then they won't believe her. When Troy falls to the Greeks, Cassandra is captured by Ajax the Lesser/Agamemnon and becomes a sex slave. Basically, I always felt sorry for her, and since my own Cassandra is the most tragic of my characters then I figured the name would be fitting.**

**Final Note: not much really happens in this chapter, which is kind of annoying and a little bit shameful, but it's plot-fodder for the next chapter... sorry, 'twas a necessary evil.**


	15. Hazel

**I don't own _Watership Down_ by Richard Adams. Nor do I own _The Once and Future King_, which was written by T. H. White.**

**An embarrassing anecdote - I just realized that it has taken 40,000 words for Our Heroine and Ozzy to have an actual conversation. Sad, no? Also, one more thing: currency in the Pokémon word is henceforth (in this story, at least) going to be referred to as pokédollars, since it eases my mind and I have never before needed to name a currency.**

* * *

I woke up before dawn, in the grey time when old people die, straight up from a nightmare that involved my mother chasing me through Eterna Forest and demanding to know why I'd let the Ariados kill Miranda. When I woke up, the first thing I saw was a ceiling fan was rotating slowly above my head, churning the hot air around and being a comfortingly normal anchor to reality. I was lying in a low cot in a tiny, cramped office stuffed with outdated computers and filing cabinets. The tall policewoman from last night was still here, sitting at a desk and drinking a sweating glass of lemonade. When she saw that I was awake, the woman raised the glass in a mock-toast and took a sip, then grimaced.

"Too sour," she commented. "How'd you sleep?"

"Okay, ma'am," I mumbled, trying not to think about the nightmare. If you didn't think about your nightmares too much then you could forget them easier.

"The Rangers came back an hour ago with their reports," the officer said, "You were right about the Spinarak and Ariados. The bodies are being collected right now, and the media people are going to have a field day when the news hits the public. I think some of 'em are already scribbling, and Mew help you if they get ahold of your name."

I groaned and put my head in my hands. "I need to get out of here," I moaned.

"Well, then go," the officer said. When I looked up at her there must have been a shocked expression on my face, because the policewoman grinned crookedly. "You're not needed as a witness anymore, kid—you can collect your pokémon and leave anytime."

I had packed all my gear back up and was heading down the stairs in less than five minutes. The policewoman ambled beside me, her hands stuck in the pockets of her uniform and her cap pulled at a jaunty angle. Up close, I could see that she had only dyed her hair the color of the other officers, and that her eyes were green rather than the brown of the other Jennys and Johnnys.

She caught me looking. "Yeah, I weren't born into no Officer family," the policewoman said, letting a bit of a Solaceon drawl enter her voice. Her lip quirked wryly, then returned to normal. "The only reason they let me join was because my first name is Jessica. Kinda weird, right, kid?"

"Yeah," I said, going down to the front desk. There was an awkward conversation with the woman in charge of trainers' pokémon, in which I had to explain _again_ that I didn't really own Ozzy and the Buneary but instead had gotten temporary custody of them until their real trainers could be found.

And now that I thought about it, I would probably have to return the Buneary to the former owner's family sometime soon. He wasn't mine, and I didn't even have the tenuous hold on him that I had on Ozzy. His real owners were _right in this very city_, so I wouldn't have an excuse for keeping him.

"Miss? Miss! Hello, earth to trainer?" someone snapped their fingers about an inch away from my nose. I shuddered and blinked once, then focused on the speaker: the woman who had custody of pokémon while their trainers enjoyed the hospitality of the Eterna City Police Department. She frowned at me as I blushed hard in embarrassment and pushed over a form covered in small print. "I need you to sign this," she said, handing over a pen alongside the form.

I tried reading the form, but quickly gave up. I'm a good reader, but you can't pile on paragraph after paragraph of Legalese and expect a ten year old girl to understand it. I signed my name on the dotted lines that the woman indicated, and got the poké balls containing Ozzy and the Buneary in return.

The weight of the balls clipped to my belt was slight, but a comforting assurance just the same. If I traveled like this for a few weeks, it would probably feel odd if I felt anything different. I waved goodbye to the Solaceon woman who'd run away from a failed college exam to become an Officer, then left the station.

On the streets, Eterna was almost deserted. There was _some_ early morning traffic but not a lot, and the furtive sneaking and snooping I had been dreading wasn't necessary. If there were any journalists or reporters who were frothing at the mouth to get a story out of me, then I couldn't see them. Nevertheless, I pulled my cap down further to hide my face and zipped up the Milotic sweatshirt despite the growing heat. You don't get many gender-defining physical features at ten years old, and my hair was pretty short. If I could pass myself off as a boy, all was well. People were looking for a girl, so they might pass me by if I didn't seem to fit the criteria.

I let Ozzy and the Buneary out of their balls. They'd each gotten a good sleep, though apparently only the Buneary had gotten anything for dinner at the station. When the Buizel complained to me about this, I just folded my arms and glared at her: it was Ozzy's own fault for refusing to behave. If she had stopped acting like a rabid, feral beast I'm sure she would have gotten something to eat.

When I told her as much, the Buizel sulked and was even more waspish that normal until I eventually gave in and took us all to a diner. Hey, _I_ was hungry too, and I wanted something greasy and fried and unhealthy to put in my stomach. If it couldn't be found in the wild and hadn't been cooked over an open fire, I wanted it. Bring on the carbonated drinks and hamburgers!

Well, as it turned out, the diner didn't have hamburgers. But it made up for that unfortunate lack with buttermilk pancakes and copious amounts of bacon, so I was willing to forgive them. The place was located a few streets down from the police station. It was old and kind of grungy, with a huge, murky strip of fingerprint-coated mirror covering much of the west wall and streaky Formica tables. The waitresses were all older, overweight women—but most of them were cheerful despite the early hour, and they were happy enough to give me food.

We ate. The Buneary had a fruit salad, I had pancakes, and Ozzy had a sausage, ham, and bacon omelet as well as half of my orange juice. I was at the point where I figured the Buizel was omnivorous and just let her have what she wanted—so long as it wasn't chocolate. I wasn't the type of novice trainer who let her pokémon have _that_. Nor was I the type of trainer who lived beyond her means—I had just enough money (thanks to my victory over the boy with the Numel) to pay for the meal, and after that... well, once I paid for this I would have a grand total of two pokédollars left, and all I could say was I that I was glad I didn't have to pay rent for a stay at the Pokémon Center.

"Fla?" something baa-ed at me. I looked down beside the table. A Flaaffy looked back at me imploringly. There were a lot of pokémon ranging around the diner's interior, trying to bribe food from the patrons. Maybe the cook or one of the waitresses owned them. I had no idea.

Ozzy, with bits of egg clinging to her whiskers and generally reducing her intimidation factor, growled menacingly at the Electric-type. The Flaaffy gave the Buizel an unimpressed glance and let some static crackle over its wool. Ozzy glared for a moment more, then sank back down in her seat and began sullenly attacking her omelet once more.

Looks like I wasn't the only one who hated type disadvantages. The stump of my finger throbbed in sympathy for a moment. It was strange, but I sometimes forgot that half of my left ring finger was missing. I'd go to snag something on one finger and miss it entirely, or else fumble whatever I was holding. It was weird and embarrassing.

The Flaafy baa-ed again and sent the tomato on my plate a pointed glance before returning its gaze to me. I handed the fruit over without comment—sure, I liked tomatoes, but I preferred them smaller and riper and drenched in salad dressing. The Flaaffy ate it with an expression of bliss on its woolly face, and I began munching my toast.

Or at least, I munched my toast until a Swinub came up to me and sat on my shoe. Apparently the word had gone out that there was a trainer around who dispensed free food, and now the pokémon were coming in like Mothim to a flame. I didn't mind, really, it was just that... well, I was hungry and there was a finite amount of food to be had. I'm not a typically selfish person, but nor am I the sort of trainer who goes around spewing altruism and starving herself to death for the sake of a pokémon she's known for all of two minutes.

I gave the Swinub a piece of pineapple from the Buneary's fruit salad, though. Just one piece. Enough to make my conscience stop taking me through a guilt trip and let me finish my toast and pancakes in peace. Two more pokémon came over, but they both received the same minimalist treatment that the Swinub had gotten and quickly gave me up as a lost cause. I wasn't expecting anybody (or any_thing_) else to show up. After the first twenty minutes it was pretty obvious to everyone/everything in the diner that my charity had become pretty grudging, and that the Buneary had become decidedly protective of his fruit salad and would slap my hand with his ears if I ventured too close.

So, therefore, I had _absolutely no idea_ that a Spinarak was going to lower itself down from the ceiling on a thread of Spider Web and land right in the middle of my table. It's not fair to do this sort of thing to me this early in the morning.

* * *

There was a lot of screaming.

Though I hate to say it, most of the screaming was produced by me and the Buneary. We both freaked out like a couple of little kids who'd been subjected to a Halloween prank. The Spinarak would have added its own voice to the choir, except that most Bug-types don't really go in for screaming beyond a really loud clicking/buzzing noise that's a fair equivalent of nails-on-chalkboard. But the Spinarak _did_ make that sound, especially when I jammed a fork into its leg and Ozzy blasted it with a Water Gun so powerful that you could have likened it to a firehose. Call it reflexive defense.

Suffice to say, all three of us were kicked out of the diner pretty promptly, dripping wet and with only two pokédollars to our names. I was still shaken up from the encounter with the Spinarak—which was embarrassing, because I had _thought_ that Vishnu and her brood hadn't really traumatized me all that much. I mean, sure I'd had a few nightmares about it, but I hadn't expected to publicly humiliate myself over the issue. As I'd already said and will probably say again at some point, it was embarrassing.

That, and the way the Spinarak's trainer glared daggers at us while she rushed her pokémon to the Center had really rubbed salt into the wound. I hadn't _meant_ to hurt her pokémon, I had just... just seen it and... yeah. I'd just seen it and assumed that it was a threat right off the bat. Arceus, but I felt stupid.

This was shaping up to be the sort of day where you wanted to hide out in your room with some good movies and pretend that you're sick whenever someone wants to talk to you. I didn't feel up to any sort of social interaction, except... I still had to return the Buneary to its owner's family. He wasn't mine and... well, I've already gone over this speech once, I don't need to go through it again. You all know I feel guilty about it.

I found the park outside the Eterna Gym (Gardenia's the _Grass_-type leader, so of course she has a park right outside her Gym) and dried out on a bench with Ozzy and the Buneary. We watched the sunrise together and I was, for once, glad of the heat. We dried out quicker that way.

Also, situated as we were right outside the Gym, we got to watch a steady stream of trainers coming and going. The place opened at six o'clock and apparently a lot of challengers had hoped to catch Gardenia half-asleep and not at her best. They had also, apparently, grossly misjudged the leader if they thought that an early start would give them an edge: for every three trainers that went in, only one left with a Forest Badge. I know, since I did a quick count and made a lot of tally-marks in the margins of this journal as I figured up the ratio.

Ozzy curled up on the bench beside me and dozed in the gentle morning light, catnapping and ready to spring to full wakefulness and fight to the death at the slightest disturbance. The Buneary played with a group of pokémon that had been released by their trainers, kids like me who were waiting to challenge Gardenia. I kept half an eye on him and used the rest of my concentration to formulate a plan.

Right. So I talked to Nurse Joy, and the Nurse would give me the name of the Buneary's real owners and I could return him to them. Let's just ignore the fact that I was giving up a potentially good battler who didn't have a type disadvantage against Gardenia for a moment. It would still be the Morally Right Thing To Do. If I withheld the Buneary from his rightful owners deliberately, then I'd be a kidnapper, and I probably wouldn't be able to live with myself once the realization sunk in.

So I'd have to go and catch myself a pokémon, probably in Eterna Forest. Bug- or Flying-type, preferably, though I guess I'd settle for whatever I could find. The good thing about Wurmple was that they grew and evolved pretty fast—I could probably train one up in a couple of weeks (time that I didn't have) and somehow manage to get either a Dustox or a Beautifly or (if I could get my hands on a Burmy) a Mothim.

And also find a steady job that paid decent money at the age of ten years, when I hadn't even _started_ high school yet. If I'm going to continue my fantasy, I might as well throw in the Sinnoh championship as well, just for kicks.

"Ozzy, why does training have to be so _hard_?" I complained.

"_If you could do it merely by wishing, the achievement would be worth absolutely nothing_," the Buizel replied dryly, sitting up and opening her eyes. That probably wasn't what she said (it could actually have a dozen other, similar things) but I think she meant something along those lines.

A heavy sigh from me. "I guess you're right."

"_On the other paw, if you had to fight a duel to the death against anyone who stood in your way..._"

"Ozzy, no. Just no. That's stupid."

"_But if it __did__ come to that? If you did have to kill someone? Would you, Trainer? Would you take a life to impress your mother? Would you measure your worth in blood if you had to?_"

I turned around to tell the Buizel how idiotic she was being and that her joke wasn't funny, but then found Ozzy looking at me intently with those sharp black eyes of hers. Somewhere nearby, the Buneary was laughing and playing with a Snover and someone's Pikachu, but the sound was somehow distant and far removed. The Buizel's eyes had a depth to them that I hadn't noticed before. What had her trainer been like? What had Ozzy done in the past? Was she warning me about something? I knew nothing for certain, but I felt uneasy all the same.

I nervously reached up to tuck my hair behind my ear, then remembered that I no longer had ponytail-length hair and let the appendage fall back to my lap. "Don't be ridiculous," I muttered, unable to meet the Buizel's gaze. "Nobody has to do that. Training is about pokémon, not killing people."

"_Nevertheless, Trainer_..." Ozzy growled, knowing that she was being ignored. She muscled her way onto my lap so as to better reclaim my attention, looking as immovable as a granite boulder and twice as ticked off.

"Nevertheless, we have things to do and I can't stop time purely for the sake of a disturbing ethical conversation that you, for some reason, see a need to have with me."

"_We're getting rid of the Buneary?_"

"Oh, don't look so gleeful."

I whistled, and when the Buneary looked up at me I waved. He came over as I stood up from my seat on the bench, with Ozzy working out the kinks in her neck and shoulders from her short nap in the sun. When I crouched down for a moment, the Normal-type happily bounded into my arms and settled there like a living, breathing plush toy. The sensation was odd, but not unpleasant. It would take a stranger ten year old girl than I to be resistant to the charms of cute pokémon.

"We're going to take you home now," I told it.

"Near? Bun bun, neary bun?" the Buneary asked.

"I have no idea what that means, but okay."

The sun had dried us off. Not completely, but I was more sort of damp than completely soaked through, which was a definite improvement. I went to the Pokémon Center and up to Room 19. The girl I was sharing a room with was gone for the day, maybe to challenge Gardenia or maybe to train, and I brushed my teeth and hair and changed into the hopelessly wrinkled but clean set of clothes I'd packed. The other ones... stank. Really badly. And the pants were stained badly enough to almost warrant burning.

But I didn't have money to buy a replacement set of clothes. Therefore, add laundry to the list of things that I needed to do, along with catching that Bug-type and securing the Sinnoh championship.

The Buneary got a bath in the tub, using the provided shampoo to make bubbles. Ozzy got rubbed down with a damp towel. She probably would have turned the bathroom into a waterpark if she'd been allowed to get her cast wet, but that wasn't the case. I ended up getting my upper body soaked with soapy water, thanks to the Buneary's splashing, but that turned out to be okay.

Also, I discovered that Ozzy had this weird thing for napping on top of washing machines. The Center's laundry room was pretty small, with lines of washers and dryers and erratically-flickering lighting in the ceiling. It was in the basement of the building, so no windows, and the bare walls and shadows and lighting made the entire place seem kinda spooky. This early in the morning, not a lot of trainers were cleaning clothes, so enough of the machines were quiet that you could hear yourself think. It was uncomfortably warm and smelled of soap. The Buneary fell asleep listening to me read my book out loud to him (hey, you can't go wrong with _The Once and Future King_) and Ozzy slept on the washing machine. There wasn't an ironing board to use once your clothes were clean, but that was okay since I had never been allowed to use one and therefore didn't know how to.

My clothes were wrinkled but clean. I didn't look like a superstar or anything, but I was as clean as my clothes and manners weren't exactly something that you could just misplace. I spent five minutes worrying about my hair, but then realized that I couldn't do anything and simply settled for brushing and combing it. Nothing but a professional haircut would make it look neat thanks to the Spider Web/String Shot that I'd had to remove with a knife, and haircuts cost... well, they cost more than I could afford, anyway.

I went back up to the lobby of the Pokémon Center and managed to snag the attention of the Nurse Joy, then spent ten minutes watching her track down the address of the Buneary's owners on her computer. It was kind of strange to watch, really—the Joy had all sorts of data on every pokémon that passed through her Center, and she could reach even more information by simply sending a request to her sister Joys. Arguably, the Sinnoh Nursing Association had dirt on just about every pokémon in Sinnoh _and_ their trainers. When you thought about the fact that the SNA also answered to the GNA (_Global_ Nursing Association) the idea was kind of... overwhelming. And a little scary.

I just hope nobody ever manages to hack their database.

The address took a long time to find, but that was mostly because the Joy's computer was outdated and slow. Once the machine actually got going it was the work of ninety seconds, tops. I was quickly armed with a scrap of notebook paper covered in Nurse Joy's precise handwriting and a tourist's map of Eterna City. I was going to find the Buneary's owners, return him, and then catch that Wurmple and start training.

It took me the rest of the morning and a decent-sized chunk of the afternoon just to find the house. This is where being a small-town girl with no idea what a _city block_ was comes back to bite you in the butt.

Eventually, though, I found the place. It was in the suburbs and rather small, with a nearly-tended garden and blue shutters on the windows. There was a Delcatty napping on the porch railing. It woke up and hissed at me when I approached. Ozzy would have lunged for it, but I recalled her to her poké ball before she could do anything and I would have to explain how the family pet got mauled by a psychopathic Buizel.

I wiped my sweating palms on my jeans and rang the bell, resisting the urge to squirm in place.

A few moments later, the door was opened by a middle-aged woman with greying hair and hazel eyes. She looked like she had been crying. As soon as I saw her, I wanted to make up a lie about how I was just handing out fliers for a charity event and really had nothing to do with the little girl who had once lived here.

"Hello," I croaked. My mouth had gone dry.

"Good afternoon," she said, visibly pulling herself together and regaining her composure through force of will. "I'm not interested in buying any—" she stopped when the Buneary in my arms cheerfully waved his ears at her in greeting. "Near!" he said. For a long moment, the woman just looked at him. I couldn't read her face and had no idea what she was thinking. I didn't _want_ to know what she was thinking.

"I, um, I met this pokémon in Eterna Forest, and I think he belongs to you, ma'am," I mumbled, taking a sudden interest in my shoes and shuffling them on the welcome mat in front of the woman's door. "I just wanted to, um, well, I thought it would be..." Arceus, this was awkward. I was no good in this sort of situation.

The woman sighed, and it was a relief for me to fall silent and patiently wait for whatever she had to say. I could wait for eternity, provided that she didn't require me to talk.

"Would you like to come inside?" she asked me.

I nodded dumbly and stepped over the threshold as she stood aside for me, looking around.

The house (what I could see of it) was mostly clean. There were a few toys scattered around, and the TV was showing a My Little Ponyta special about the power of friendship. I smelled baking brownies and saw a young girl no older than six or seven peeping at me from behind a battered armchair. There was a Growlithe napping on the floor in a patch of sunshine, with straggly ribbons braided into its tail. This place was altogether different from the house I had grown up in, which was austere in its furnishings and practically sterile in its hominess. Different, but not... bad. Better, maybe. Certainly more loving.

I bit my lip nervously, feeling as out of my element as a Tauros at a tea party.

"Please sit and wait a moment," the woman said. "My husband will want to hear about this." I quickly chose a spot on the couch and set the Buneary down. He immediately wandered away from me to go wake up the Growlithe for a game, followed by the little girl who had formerly been hiding behind the armchair. I twiddled my thumbs and examined the pattern on carpet.

Fairly soon, a man about the same age as the woman came into the room and sat down on a chair opposite the couch I had claimed. His hair was entirely grey and he had a paunch beneath the burgundy workshirt he was wearing. His eyes, looking at me through wire-framed spectacles, were blue and tired. The woman joined us quickly, sitting beside her husband and holding his hand. My throat closed up and I frantically tried to think of something to tell them.

"Thank you for bringing Hazel back to us," the man said. "We're... we're very grateful for that. But... if you don't mind... we'd like to ask you some questions about... about the circumstances of how you met him."

I blinked once in surprise. "Of course," I found myself murmuring. "Ask anything you like." This was easier than I thought. No-one was shouting and me or blaming me for the girl's death. I was doing fine.

"To be blunt," the man said, taking off his glasses and quickly buffing them on the hem of his shirt. It might have been a habit. "Assuming you were in the Forest at the time of the... of the tragedy... and the news reports are true, do you know how Abigail died? Resa and I... we just want to know whether or not it was quick. Did she say anything about us? Any... messages?"

For a moment, my mind blanked out and all I could focus on was the man's earnest, terribly hopeful face. He thought I had seen his daughter die. He thought that I had known her personally. He thought I had found the Buneary—Hazel, apparently—by taking him in after the death of his...

For about five seconds, I very dearly wanted to throw up. Then I recovered myself and wrestled a reasonably coherent answer together. It sounded good in my head, at least.

"_Arceus_, this is, um... Sir and Ma'am, I didn't really... Look, I didn't see your daughter die. I don't even know what she looked like. The morning after the showdown with the Spinarak in the Forest I woke up and found a Buneary with a green ribbon around its neck taking a nap on top of me. When I got out of the Forest, Nurse Joy identified him and gave me your address. I—I'm sorry, but I can't help you with this. I, um, I'm sure your daughter loved you very much and is thinking fondly of you from... from wherever she is now. Er."

I shut up after that. The speech hadn't sounded nearly so good out loud, and I didn't want to come across as one of those people who ooze sympathy for your hurts and then try and get you to give them something for free. Also, the way the little girl's—Abigail's—parents were looking at me was fit to break your heart. The expressions on their faces looked almost like I had killed their daughter myself.

I felt like a piece of scum for coming here and giving them false hope, even for such a short amount of time. They hadn't even wanted very _much_, really. Just a final message from their daughter and the assurance that she had died without pain. I felt horrible. I wanted to slink out of this nice, friendly house with my tail between my legs and go hide out in the Forest until everyone had forgotten about me.

"You didn't...?" the woman began, trailing off. "You really didn't...?"

I stared down at the hands I had folded in my lap and mutely shook my head, feeling wretched.

The man heaved himself up from his chair and walked through the doorway to the kitchen, taking a framed photograph down from the wall. He slipped the photo out from behind the glass and came back, handing it to me. I took it without comment and examined it.

Sunlight had faded the photo, so it must have been taken awhile ago. In it was a girl with coppery curls and several thousand pokédollars worth of orthodontia in her smile, cuddling a young Buneary. At the base of the photo, someone had used green crayon to write the words _Abby & Hazel_. My throat closed up and for a few moments as I tried not to cry. For those few moments I looked at the photo without really seeing it, images of partially-decayed corpses tumbling from silk cocoons flickering through my mind.

"She looks very pretty here," I said, forcing a smile onto my face and trying to hand the photo back to the man. "I would have liked to meet her."

The man waved the photo away. "Keep it," he said. "You at least saved Hazel from certain death, so it's only right that you get a picture of Abigail."

A constant reminder of what I had failed to save. Great. Every time I looked at the photo of Abigail I was going to wonder what might have been different if I had stumbled across Vishnu's lair a few days earlier. Would I have been escorting both a stray pokémon _and_ his trainer home? The girl's face was going to haunt my nightmares, I was sure of it. Along with Cassandra and Vishnu.

"Oh, no," I said, trying to keep my polite smile in place. "I really couldn't. I mean, it wouldn't be right to take—"

"Nonsense," the man cut in, holding up a hand to make me go quiet. "Hazel might want to look at it from time to time. I'm sure your travels are going to take you far from Eterna City, and he might appreciate having a little piece of her going with him."

"Excuse me, sir? I don't quite follow you."

"Hazel is yours now, young miss. I loved my Abigail dearly, and the Buneary would only serve as a reminder of what's lost to us. And besides..." he leaned forward in his chair and lowered his voice, his grief-faded eyes boring into mine like gimlets, "Every day you will look at that pokémon and think of what you could have done differently."

Things went downhill from there, you could say.

Less than five minutes later I was leaving the house, with a pre-named Buneary riding on my shoulders and Ozzy at my side. The picture of Abigail was tucked into my wallet, next to my trainer card. I had a new pokémon to go up against Gardenia with, and a new weight on my soul.

* * *

**Aaaand here I am, feeling ashamed of myself because I haven't written anything very significant beyond a disturbing ethical conversation (the first of many) and an entire scene about what the Buneary's name is. Kudos to you if you realized why I put a disclaimer for _Watership Down_ as soon as you realized the Buneary's name is Hazel.**


End file.
